Rating and value of paintings by Janet Sobel

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Rating and value of the artist Janet Sobel    

Janet Sobel is a well-known artist among modern and contemporary art lovers. Now, prices for her works are rising at the auctioneers' gavel.

Her oils on canvas are particularly prized, especially by American buyers, and the price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €500 to €57,200, a significant delta but one that speaks volumes about the value that can be attributed to the artist's works.

In 2023, his untitled gouache on paper from 1948 sold for €57,200, whereas it was estimated at between €19,000 and €28,500. Its value is rising sharply.

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The works and style of Janet Sobel  

Janet Sobel (1893 - 1968) was a pioneering dripping artist. She took up painting around 1939, without any academic training, and painted her canvases on the floor in her living room in Brighton Beach. She was one of the first to use the " all-over " dripping technique, in which African paint is poured, splashed or dripped all over the surface.

She creates a dense, graphic network right to the edge of the canvas. She works with innovative materials, using enamel or industrial paint, as well as unconventional tools such as a dropper or vacuum cleaner, with the aim of producing effects of tension and movement.

She inherits a surreal, subconscious gestural style. Indeed, her automaton method recalls surrealist artists, while she pursues a free gesture directly inspired by the unconscious.

The layers she applies are multi-stratified : she superimposes paint and figurative motifs (in her early days), then evolves towards total abstraction, using visual weaving effects that evoke tapestries or embroidery.

She fills the entire surface, leaving no empty space, in an obsessive, ornamental style that comes close to the concept of horror vaccui (literally horror of emptiness).

Her work has a formal impact since she was a pioneer before Pollock : she introduced her dripping " all-over " as early as 1944, and her production is recognized as one of the earliest instances of this style by Clement Greenberg (art historian, philosopher and critic) ; and Jackson Pollock himself.

Her work is placed in a duality between figuration and abstraction, gradually moving from figurative, surrealist motifs (faces, flowers) to lyrical abstraction, while retaining her expressive gesture. She employs vivid colors (yellow, pink, green...) whose vibratory interactions support the emotion and energy of the canvas.

The life of Janet Sobel  

Janet Sobel (1893 - 1968) was born as Jennie Olechovsky in Katerynoslav (today Dnipro in Ukraine). Born into a Jewish family, she fled persecution after her father died in a pogrom. They emigrated to New York in 1908 and settled in Brighton Beach.

She married Max Sobel around 1910 and raised five children in the Brooklyn neighborhood. She began painting between 1937 and 1939, at the age of 44. She was encouraged by her son Sol, then an art student, and began in her living room, on makeshift supports.

In 1943, she was spotted by collectors such as Sidney Janis and philosopher John Dewey, who helped promote her work. She then exhibited at the Puma Gallery (New York, 1944) and at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery, where Clement Greenberg and Peggy Guggenheim had the opportunity to discover her drip paintings.

She left New York in 1946 for New Jersey, which reduced her visibility. She had to give up painting because of allergies around 1948, but returned to drawing.

She died in November 1968 in Plainfield, New Jersey, and her work was rediscovered after her death, with retrospective exhibitions such as Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou in 2021. One of her paintings was also exhibited at the Musée Picasso in Paris in 2024, alongside canvases by Pollock in an exhibition dedicated to the artist.

Janet Sobel and Jackson Pollock - Putting them into perspective

Sobel and Pollock undeniably have productions that dialogue. This is the case, for example, with Janet Sobel's Milky Way (1945) and Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950).

Milky Way is an " all-over " realization made with paint drips, splashes and enamel paint on flat canvas, producing a dense gestural network right up to the edges.

In Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, he uses paint on the ground which is spilled, but also applied through the dripping and pouring technique of industrial enamel controlled by the body in motion, which is the signature of " panting as action ".

Sobel uses paint in luminous, delicate colors (light blue, cream, pink) that evoke a celestial, poetic composition. Pollock works in more complex tones (blacks, grays, browns) with thicker impasto to create visual density.

Both share all-over in visual structure and composition. In Sobel's case, these are uniform patterns covering the entire surface, without center or hierarchy. Pollock's is a self-contained fractal network with no focal point, evoking continuity and infinity (a concept reinforced by fractal analysis).

Each of her works has a singular historical place and influence : Janet Sobel was admired by Greenberg and had an influence on Pollock, who for his part popularized " drip painting " within Abstract Expressionism, benefiting from her notoriety and often being credited as its inventor.
These points serve to highlight Sobel's technical anticipation, often erased by the dominant male reception, but also the shared bodily know-how, but with different temporal and aesthetic expressions.

The contrasting palette indicates two distinct emotional sensibilities. Their historical status is also different, since Sobel is a marginal figure who tends to be better known, while Pollock is a central artist, emerging with an amplified gesture.

The imprint of Janet Sobel

Janet Sobel is an important artist in the history of twentieth-century art. As early as 1944, she developed a method of projecting paint onto canvas laid on the ground, anticipating the dripping gesture later popularized by Jackson Pollock.

Her work Milky Way is the first canvas entirely " all-over " by an American artist, according to some historians such as Sidney Janis and Clement Greenberg.

She employs an intuitive, spontaneous approach derived from art brut and surrealist automatism, which places her in a transition between surrealism and abstract expressionism.

Her work blends ornament, motif, abstraction and the subconscious, with echoes of embroidery, oriental rugs and folk art. This hybridity, which has long been perceived as " feminine " or naïve, has contributed to her invisibilization in the dominant narratives of modern art.

She is today being revalued as a pioneering figure of feminine abstract art, breaking with the masculine codes of action painting. Her role was forgotten, then rediscovered. Although briefly recognized in the 1940s, she was relegated to the shadow of Pollock from the 1950s onwards.

She was rediscovered from the 1990s onwards, notably by art historians and institutions such as MoMA and the Centre Pompidou (Women in Abstraction, 2021). She is now considered a missing link in the history of gestural painting, between modernity and marginality.

Today, her value is being revalued on the market in the image of other artists such as Judit Reigl or Marie Raymond.

Her signature

Not all of Janet Sobel's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of her signature:

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