The path-breaking artist Janet Sobel (1893–1968) flourished in the New York art world of the 1940s. Dripping and pouring skeins of paint onto horizontally positioned boards or canvases and filling these supports from corner to corner, Sobel was an early practitioner of “all-over” painting. Beginning in the 1940s, this approach to modern abstraction was closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. It involved applying nonrepresentational marks across an entire composition, lavishing as much attention on the edges as on the center.

The story of Sobel’s trajectory makes for a quirky tale. Born in a shtetl in eastern Ukraine, Sobel immigrated to the US as a teen in 1908 with her mother and two siblings to escape the pogroms in which her father perished. With no formal training, the artist began painting when she was almost in her fifties, now the matriarch of two generations of Americans. By 1943, she was exhibiting publicly: Her work was included that year in Sidney Janis’s exhibitions “American Primitive Painting of Four Centuries” at the Arts Club of Chicago, where it was shown alongside Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses, and the following year in the nationally touring “Abstract and Surrealist Art in America,” where her peers were Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Sobel’s 1944 solo show at the New York gallery of Fernando Puma, a highly professionalized self-taught artist, was positively reviewed in nearly a dozen outlets.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Lauren Moya Ford, Hyperallergic (excerpt)