Ep. 153: Curator Natalie Dupêcher "Janet Sobel: All Over"

This is Artsense.

a podcast focused on educating and informing listeners about the past, present, and future of art. I'm Craig Gould. On today's episode, I speak with Nathalie Dupachet, Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection. about the fascinating and often overlooked artist janet sobel known for her pioneering drip painting technique and all-over aesthetic sobel significantly influenced the abstract expressionist movement

even preceding Jackson Pollock. We discuss Sobel's artistic development, her use of unconventional materials, and her work's bridging of surrealism to abstract expressionism. We also delve into the Menil Collection's current exhibition, exploring key highlights, themes, and the curatorial process behind showcasing her work. Janet Sobel, All Over, is on view at the Menil Collection in Houston through August 11th. And now, a conversation about the short yet impactful career of Janet Sobel.

with curator Nathalie Depeche. Thank you so much for joining me today on the art sense podcast. Uh, Natalie, you're the mental collections associate curator of modern art. And I wanted to speak with you today about an exhibit that's currently going on titled Janet Sobel All Over, which is on exhibit now through August 11th there at the Menial Collection in Houston.

Natalie, it is such an intriguing story to learn about Janet Sobel, and I can't wait to dig in. But I think for those who don't know who Janet Sobel is, We can't necessarily blame them for never having heard of Janet Sobel. Where do you start to describe to people who this person was?

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I am always delighted to talk about this show and about Janet Sobel's work. So Janet Sobel is an artist who came to prominence in New York in the early to mid 1940s and was an early abstract painter, an early practitioner of the style that already then in 1944 was being called all over painting.

This was a new approach to abstract painting in the United States that involved applying non-representational marks literally all over a piece of canvas or a board whatever the surface was and applying those abstract marks in a kind of non-hierarchical way. so that one paid as much attention to the corners and edges as the center, which was somewhat new at that moment. And it's an approach that I think probably a lot of people...

you know, can conjure what it looks like. And it maybe looks like a painting by Jackson Pollock or some of the more well-known, more household names of the abstract expressionist group. But Sobel was also one of those artists in the mix and she had this short but incredibly luminary career.

for a few years in in there a few years in the 1940s and was incredibly influential i think an argument of this show is that um her pioneering use of all over abstraction was um something that a lot of artists followed or a lot of artists were inspired by and would go on to make their own in different ways well i i think one of

the more compelling aspects of her story was that she was self-taught. And it's not like... you know we think of today where an artist has a recipe for a career path that is you're in your mid-20s and you're deciding whether you want to go to a hunter or yale to get your mfa she was already a grandmother and i think in terms of context the art world was very open to the concept of uh welcoming in a self-taught artist at this particular moment that she winds up gathering attention right

Yeah, I think there's a few things to point out there is that, yes, Sobel is self-taught and began making art, as you said, later in her life. She was born... in 1893 her first exhibition uh is in 1943 so she's 50 years old when she really starts making art in earnest And that unusual biography was one thing.

that intrigued critics and reviewers and collectors at the time even back in the early 1940s and then as you say there was this tremendous openness to so-called self-taught or naive was another somewhat equivalent term in those days. So this was an art world that was A, much, much, much smaller than the one in which we live now, and B, that had this openness to self-taught artists.

One of the reasons for that is that in the early mid-1940s, the Surrealists have come to New York from... France from around Europe. Many of those who have been able to have fled Europe and World War II and settled in New York.

reconstellated a kind of surrealist movement in exile and the surrealists bring with them this interest in the art of the untrained as well as art made by children and all kinds of people who have been traditionally perhaps excluded from the so-called fine art world so there's a lot of different you know the art world in new york in those years in the early mid 1940s of like sort of messy experimental playground where you have the old

generation of surrealists that have in part an interest in self-taught art there's also the up-and-coming school new york school of the artists that will coalesce into the abstract expressionists so it's in this

kind of twisty and still experimental milieu that Sobol finds her path. The surrealists are open to... naive art they're open to outsider art self-taught because uh very a big part of what they are you know kind of espousing is this notion of imagining the unimaginable and how do you tap into that you know whether it's rattan talking about automatic writing or on the visual side automatic drawings and

i think they they probably see especially in some of the all over work uh something that looks very akin to the automatic drawings right yeah i think that's absolutely right um That part of the surrealist interest in untrained, self-taught, naive, etc. artists is this feeling that such artists who haven't been...

formally trained, formally schooled, are closer to or better able to tap into the subconscious than those of us who have been through school and had all these sorts of barriers put in place, right? And so I think that is certainly a part of that interest. And it's worth saying too that You know, if we think about those years, those early years for Janet Sobol, she is meeting and. her entry into the art world comes in part, not exclusively, but in part

with and through the surrealists. So Max Ernst is someone who seems to, you know, we know from letters that he seems to visit her at the family's home in Brooklyn. one of the first art exhibitions that she seems to visit.

or at least i'll rephrase that not we don't know if it's the first art exhibition that she visits but an early drawing that janet sobel makes uh that's in our exhibition here at the menil is a drawing that she does on the back of a Salvador Dali brochure that's published by the Museum of Modern Art, and her work is discussed in the context of surrealism.

So that surrealist context and its plurality and the sort of interest that it brings to New York in these years is an important part of understanding her reception and how she...

she is able to be noticed and how her art sort of catches critical attention in the first place. Can you illuminate a little bit more how she goes from making work in her living room to making those connections. Because it... I think she would attest on her own that she never really looked at other people's work. She really didn't go to museums. And so...

The entry came by somebody seeing her work and connecting the dots to what was going on, right? Was it her son that made that connection? Her son Saul. So, yes. Saul Sobel, we know, is enrolled at the Art Students League, an art school in New York from 1939 to 1940. That is in many accounts and is attested to even back in 1944 when the first articles on her begin to be published. The story that is relayed then is that. saul is in art school and through that janet his mother

There are various, there's kind of different valences to the story that appear already in 44. There's sort of different versions, but essentially he's enrolled in art school and through that Janet sort of picks up the pen. and starts making her own paintings and drawings. Then...

Saul this is sort of according to both family story and according to some contemporary sources although as you point out there's not a lot but Saul brings drawings and perhaps some small paintings that Janet had made to his instructors at the Art Students League. And they are interested in it and encouraging of it. I also know from research that I did at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, which has two.

really amazing Janet Sobel paintings that Saul actually brought examples of her work to MoMA in 1940. like which is one of the earliest traces that I have found of him like going around town and sort of shopping her art around. So Saul is a key sort of force that brings her work from just something that she's doing, you know, in private into more public view. And then her first

The first public display of her work is, as I mentioned before, in 1943. And that's a big group show at the Brooklyn Museum. It is open to artists living in the borough so it's um you know i think it's a juried exhibition but it has hundreds of artists included And from there, her art catches the attention of the dealer and collector, Sydney Janus, who is a name that may be well known to people who are familiar with this period.

Among many other things, he is particularly interested in self-taught, quote-unquote naive, untrained artists. and includes Sobel in a traveling exhibition called Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States. And in these years, I mean, this is like 1943, 44, like that first kind of very compressed year, she is making art that is stylistically... more narrative that has figures in it, figures in a landscape. I sometimes describe these works as Chagall-like kind of quotes.

that seem to sort of allude to scenes of the old country. I mean, the important thing to say, though, is that they are not yet abstract. And I think that's one reason why Sidney Janis is really. really interested in them. And then her work really quite rapidly over the next year or so but really quite rapidly undergoes this kind of evolution into abstraction.

You know, there's a lot of interest in investigation these days in terms of re-examining the canon and re-determining where has art history... in our modern world gotten it wrong and i think sometimes people fear that that in the course of doing that people just kind of pick a name and maybe, you know, elevate someone who wasn't really known in their time. But that that's not the case here, right? I mean, oftentimes we find that it's just the opposite that.

you know there are female artists who were known and respected in their time it's just that art history has forgotten it because somebody became the the voice of record right And so can you talk a little bit more about the level of respect she wound up garnering in that window where the world was moving from? a world of surrealism coming to the United States and abstract expressionists taking off. There was a point there where she was in the conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly right. And I think there's all kinds of ways to do a revisionist art show and certainly one. is this artist who no one maybe knew even in their own time this artist is actually very key for understanding xyz but as you point out that isn't that this this isn't that type of show um Sobel was known and extensively reviewed and profiled in the early mid-1940s in the New York scene.

as a real kind of known figure. I think the height of that recognition comes in 1946. That's when she has her

first solo show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery. It's her second ever solo show, the first solo show with Peggy Guggenheim. And this is where she debuts her incredible all-over abstract paintings, including Works like Milky Way, that's now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art that's here at the Manila Collection, including works like The Attraction of Pink, also from 1945, that's currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum.

in Washington, DC. This is a big kind of splashy event in the New York art world. And we know, for instance, from period accounts that Jackson Pollock goes to that show, goes to the show at Peggy Guggenheim's with Clement Greenberg. We also know because Greenberg writes about it later, he writes that they admired these abstractions, quote unquote, rather furtively, which I think says a lot and is pretty great.

I mean just pretty great to sort of throw into the bag of what's going on at that time. But that they they realized and later said that these were the first really all over abstractions that they had seen. And so. Certainly this show at Peggy Guggenheim's and these works like Milky Way that Sobel was making in late 44, early 45 stand as some of the first of this.

all over abstract style um and we can talk um if you want there's a multitude of reasons i think why sobel goes from being this um you know kind of household name or artist artist to a much more obscure name that has to do with both the events of her own life, but also the way that art history was written in the intervening decades. But yes, in her time in 1946, particularly, she's really at the forefront.

Well, as we write the script for this biopic, how does it turn that she's kind of on top of it and then becomes a footnote in a Greenberg article in the late 60s? Yeah, I, through my research, have come to see that there's really a handful of events that come. sort of very quickly tumbled after that show at Guggenheim's. The first is that Sobel develops an allergy to something in the paint.

that she uses. That's how it's described in the Brooklyn Eagle in late 1946, which I also think just side note is kind of extraordinary that. There's this interest in her such that a local paper is writing like, oh, she she has an allergy to something in her materials. It's kind of fascinating. But. she develops an allergy to something in the paint that she's using and so while it wouldn't be correct to say that she stops painting or abandons painting it does seem that her painting production

really starts to slow in the late 1940s. She continues to make work for 10 or 15 years. Her health begins to decline. She dies in 1968. paintings like the attraction of pink and milky way um you know there aren't there's not a tremendous amount more after that although there are some important exceptions anyway the allergy is one another key reason i think um is that peggy guggenheim leaves new york peggy guggenheim had

really emerged as Sobel's primary champion. In addition to that solo show I mentioned, she included her in group shows and really interestingly was also sending her paintings. all over the country in these traveling shows. Peggy in particular sent one of her paintings to the University of Iowa in 1945 for a contemporary art show, so it's being seen all over.

But Peggy closes the Art of this Century gallery in 1947, and then she moves to Venice. And so Sobel loses her, you know, primary champion and the person that's been... really advocating for her. And then the third precipitating factor is that Sobel leaves New York and moves to Plainfield, New Jersey. I don't want to overstate that because it is true that living in Brighton Beach is about an hour to midtown Manhattan.

Same as Plainfield, New Jersey. So it's not as though she's like moved to Maine or something. But it does introduce a new kind of distance, a new kind of potential commute. And coupled with the fact that she isn't painting quite as much and the fact that her real advocate...

has left means that Sobel doesn't have any more exhibitions in New York after 1946. She does continue to show her work, so we know that she doesn't like she doesn't stop making art um but she's showing in a much smaller pool she's showing in new york and sorry she's I'll start over. She's showing in a much smaller pool in New Jersey small art galleries.

and community centers and art supply stores and things like that. I mean, I think those are still interesting as a sign of her ongoing commitment to making art.

of course it's very different to be showing your work in an art store in plainfield new jersey versus uh at the art of this century gallery in my memory in my recollection the the family business was like a costume jewelry business and you know is that the source of some of the materials she was using i mean you know when i hear about some of the enamels that she might have been using i'm thinking in terms of her using something

Like in my head, I'm imagining you're using something as simple as like nail polish. Like what, what were the materials? Because I know eventually she got. She started with drawing and kind of went back at the end after the toxicity of whatever it was to using crayons and things. But what were those materials that... When we look at Milky Way or when we talk about her developing an allergy, was it enamels or were they acrylics? Do we have a good idea? I think one, we don't know with...

100% sort of scientific certainty. I hope that there will be many more sort of technical examinations of Sobol's paintings in the coming years. But that being said, From the family and from some contemporary accounts, yes, she is using materials from the family jewelry making business in her artwork. Sobel Brothers is the customer. jewelry business, that's the name of the family company, and they became very well known in the 1930s in particular.

and then on through the 40s and 50s for making artificial pearls. And I think when you know that the pearlescent... quality of some of her paintings kind of makes a lot of sense um and you can sort of immediately see that as a potential source um and so yes a lot of the enamels enamels is a really broad category of kinds of paint that could mean a lot of different things. But our thinking is that she's using those sorts of materials from the family jewelry making business in her paintings.

And Sobel Brothers moves is one of the reasons for that move because the company. moves headquarters to Perth Amboy in New Jersey in 1946-47. So that's the reason for the relocation from Brighton Beach to New Jersey. Did the scale of her work... wind up holding her back any because i mean you know that that generation that that we're those names that we were talking about that were emerging in the late 40s early 50s the

Those canvases were getting gigantic. And we have photos of her lying on her stomach on the floor of her living room or maybe working at the kitchen table. I heard you... earlier referred to milky way as as a large piece but that's kind of a relative term right i mean can you talk a little bit about scale and what the scale of her work is in

Did scale wind up adding anything to her being overlooked as that segment emerged? Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I mean, Milky Way is... a larger painting for her um but it's not a mural it's not this sort of great big you know 10 or 12 feet wide canvases that we start to get with a lot of the other first and second generation abstract expressionists. She generally is on a more kind of human-sized scale. I think that some of the larger paintings I've seen are around...

maybe, you know, six feet or so. So, I mean, again, sort of human scaled and not. so much larger. It's interesting to think about the way that the places in which she was working could shape or determine that. there's the famous photograph that if anyone googles janet sobel it's one of the first results of her working in the apartment in brighton beach I think it's a staged photograph that was taken for Life magazine, I believe, where she is working on a painting. She's actually working on.

The Frightened Bride, a painting that she completes in 1944 and is surrounded by a number of other canvases including a painting in LACMA's collection, the burning bush that we have here in our show. Anyway, you can see, though, that that's a room that is a sort of New York apartment-sized space. And of course, that dictates the size of work that one can make.

when she moves to new jersey they have a much larger house and so in theory she has a much larger space where she could have created really large-scale paintings She does create some large paintings in those years. I'm thinking of Hiroshima. and heavenly sympathy that are two works on loan to us from crystal bridges museum of american art and those are in the six foot high neighborhood but again she isn't

going super massive. And I think one reason for that, although it's impossible to know for sure, but it seems to me that one reason for that is this allergy, is that perhaps she just isn't able to work with that. those enamel paints from the business um she perhaps isn't able to work for them she isn't able to work with them

for very long periods of time or maybe has to limit how much she exposes herself to those. It's hard to know because we don't have, you know, like notebooks um or we have um sketch pads like where she made drawings but there does not exist from what i have found diary entries or anything like that where she would describe

exactly what her conditions are or exactly the way in which she's working. So this is somewhat speculative, of course. But that's sort of my understanding of the scale question. Yeah, it seems like...

Doing the research for a show like this, in working like you do to understand someone like Janet Sebel better, it seems like it would be really intriguing. But it seems like it would also be... frustrating in ways and i i feel like it would leave you with with a whole list of questions you wish you could find answers to Can you kind of share some of those questions that you wish you knew that you just you can't find? Yeah, I didn't.

a lot of research for this show i'll just sort of preface the answer by saying the show has been in the works since around 2021 so i was have been love i mean i loved working on this show i loved doing the research for it i worked went to see all the paintings in real life and in some cases like the in the case of MoMA like I mentioned earlier the museum archives have some great

the statements or descriptions or sort of traces of Sobel from the moment when the works were acquired. So that was a really intriguing place to find, you know, not tremendous volumes of writing but some really fascinating tidbits. I also went to the Archives of American Art, which has the archives for a number of galleries where she showed. And I was also really lucky in meeting a number of Sobel's grandchildren, a number of whom lent to the show and who have some memories of her.

I think, though, that, you know, like I said, there's a lot a lot that we don't know and that I. you know it seems to me that it might not be totally knowable if we could travel back in time obviously the ideal would be to speak with the artist herself um but even if this had been even if we were to go back like 20 or 25 years when Saul Sobel was still alive, Saul the son that was really instrumental in her getting her

career off the ground and getting her art shown to other people. There's a lot more that that could be known. One question that I've wrestled with a lot is there's a story that Sobel, she used a lot of unconventional instruments in making her paintings.

and one of the stories that i've heard in that context is that she used a vacuum cleaner to spread or blow wet paint around so if you imagine a horizontally positioned board or canvas and she drips paint on it from above and while it's still wet she uses a vacuum like the hose of a vacuum cleaner to push or pull the paint around the surface and manipulate the composition. using that instrument. And I have not been able to find whether that's true, but I would really like to know.

I can look at some of those lines and I can imagine that being the case just by the appearance. that would be lovely to know yeah yeah and it's kind of like such an irresistible um you know symbol of her work too um if you think about her as a over you know important but then for many decades long overlooked female artist in a man's world making art with a vacuum cleaner is kind of an irresistible like

you know, added something to the narrative. I just don't know if it's true. Yeah, because I mean, it's not just, I mean, it's, it wraps itself up in so many ways in terms of like, being self-taught and being on the outside and using unconventional methods but also you know using the the tool of domesticity yeah right and so it's

That's, it's really, it's romantic. And, you know, maybe we should just go ahead and proclaim it as being true. Yeah. Because it's so delicious, right? Yeah, exactly. But tell me, tell me about the reception to the show.

what has reception been like locally and nationwide to you know bringing this work together in her getting her day in a way that she hasn't in, you know, what is close to 80 years. Yeah, I mean, the reception has been so heartening and really rewarding. We've had a great response here and also from.

around the country. The show has been reviewed in national outlets, not just sort of local Houston and Texas publications. I've heard from a number of artists in particular who have really been drawing a lot of inspiration, not only from her story, but also from the work itself. I do think that there's a lot for people to take encouragement or nourishment from it in both of those aspects, both her biography and the artwork itself. You know, this exhibition, we really focused on her

abstract practice and where we include paintings that have figures in them or landscapes. It's all sort of with the thought of how does she get to the abstract work how is this on the path of going to the abstract work that's really the the kind of crucial like nugget that I wanted to focus on. But one thing that I realized in the course of doing research for this show and seeing so many so many you know dozens maybe even hundreds more paintings that i saw that i didn't include is that her work

was also quite stylistically varied. She had an amazing career as an abstractionist and I think made a real lasting and significant contribution to American art history as an abstract painter, but she also made those narrative Chagall-like paintings that I mentioned earlier. She made a number of paintings that seem to be about

war and conflict that have cannons and soldiers in them. She made paintings about theater she made beach side paintings she has all these um sort of seaside seaside scenes so there's a vast um her her corpus is quite vast uh in ways that i didn't know at the beginning of this project and so a hope of mine is that as this show is bringing more attention to her work

And yes, more attention to her abstract work, but that also all kinds of future scholarship and exhibitions will be able to focus on those other parts of her career as well. Does that imagery also reflect her years back in Russia, which I guess that area is now considered part of the Ukraine? It seems like that chapter of her life was almost like a scene out of Fiddler on the Roof in terms of what the family went through and the departure there. Is that part of the narrative that she winds up...

using in the figurative work? Yeah, I think unavoidably that part of her much earlier... personal biography belongs to that the 1940s as well um so just to fill it in a little bit um she's born in 1893 and then around age 15 or so around 1906 1908 ish she with her mother and two siblings flees ukraine and comes to new york They leave after one of the pogroms that kills her father. And so that is, I think.

certainly a huge part of her history. And then when she starts to make art in the 1940s, there's war has come to the European continent. one of her sons is fighting abroad and so i think both of those experiences you know sort of all of it goes into shaping her quote-unquote wartime paintings from the 40s well Natalie, I really appreciate your time today. And I really encourage everyone who's near Houston to make it out to the Mineral Collection to catch the show Janet Sobel all over.

which is on exhibit now through August 11th. Natalie, I really appreciate your time. Thank you. It was great to talk Sobel with you. And there's another, like you said, few weeks to come see the show. That's all the time we have for this week. You've been listening to ArtSense.

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