Attributed to Janet Sobel, it does not have a COA. Medium: oil board. 41 x 29 inches. Provenance: private owner.
Biography: 1894 - 1968. Janet Sobel is best known as the self-taught artist whose drip paintings of the early 1940s influenced Jackson Pollock. Her work has been acclaimed both in the "high" art world of Abstract Expressionism, and in the "outsider" or "Folk Art" world of self-taught artistsSobel was born in 1894 in the Ukraine, emigrated to New York in 1908, and married and raised a family of five children before becoming, "one of America's most talked about surrealist painters." Completely untrained, Sobel first painted in 1937 at the age of 43. She began with figurative images that were painted in a primitive style. By 1943 her work had moved into a spontaneous expressionistic style of abstraction that gained her serious admiration among such art world luminaries as Peggy Guggenheim, the surrealists Max Ernst and Andre Breton, the philosopher and educator John Dewey and critic and collector Sidney Janis.Her first one-person show was at Puma Gallery at 108 West Fifty-seventh Street in 1944; a short essay about Sobel by John Dewey introduced the checklist. In addition she was in the Women show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, in 1945. Her abstract painting attracted the attention of Max Ernst, Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Sidney Janis, who wrote the foreword to the pamphlet accompanying her one-person exhibition in 1946 at Art of This Century.Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock attended the Peggy Guggenheim exhibition in 1946. Greenberg later recalled that after seeing Sobel's all-over drip paintings, "Pollock (and I myself) admired these pictures rather furtively. The effect and it was the first really all-over one that I had seen, since [Mark ] Tobey's show came months later, was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him."

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Signed [Artist Name] : In cases in which the signature is legible in the lot, this work is described as-is with no attributions given.

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American, 19th century: This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).

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