Janet Sobel: War | Volodymyr Havrysh

Around this time, in the early 1940s, Sobel also befriended the surrealist Max Ernst. Newspapers relished the details of the artist’s bourgeois life and mockingly recounted stories of Janet’s inspired treatment of the great artist with her own baked chicken. Max Ernst evidently liked more than just the chicken, as he introduced Janet to his wife, the gallerist Peggy Guggenheim.

Thanks to this acquaintance, Sobel took part in a number of key exhibitions for the history of American modernism, and above all in Peggy Guggenheim's project "Art of the Century", which presented new American art and became a new stage for the era. Janet had personal presentations in New York galleries and participated in group shows. Mark Rothko wrote letters to the artist regarding the organization of one of the exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim space. At this stage, Sobel's works were only occasionally called primitive, instead proclaiming the author a surrealist.

In the mid-1940s, the artist's work underwent a significant transformation: she moved from figurative to partial or complete abstraction. It was thanks to this period that Sobel entered the history of American art. Critic Clement Greenberg recognized that the work of Sobel, which he saw at one of the exhibitions, was the first painting made in the spirit of allover painting - this is a very high assessment, given the importance of this approach for the history of American post-war art. In the late 1960s, the author of a biographical investigation about Jackson Pollock, an authoritative art critic and curator who was just beginning his long-term collaboration with the MoMA museum, William Rubin, called Janet Sobel's works a source of inspiration for Pollock's experiments in the drip painting technique. Two works of the artist ended up in the MoMA collection, but, unfortunately, this was the end of the art world's recognition of the unique author.

Over the past decades, Sobel's name has gradually returned to the field of view of specialists, however, only today, more than fifty years after the artist's death, the time has come for a full-scale rethinking of her legacy in the context of revising the patriarchal version of the history of American modernism and 20th-century art in general."

With an essay by Alisa Lozhkina