Janet Sobel: All-Over

This exhibition focuses on the abstract paintings made by Janet Sobel (1893–1968) during the 1940s. Short-lived but meteoric, her career began in 1943, when leading New York dealers, collectors, and other artists took up her work, culminating in a solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in 1946.​​

Acclaimed for her skillful use of color and densely layered compositions that spilled to the edges of the support, Sobel pioneered what became known as “all-over” abstraction. American critic Clement Greenberg later called her paintings “the first really all-over effect that I had seen.” Sobel preceded Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock’s better-known use of this technique, and thus her work challenges existing narratives around mid-century modernism. Organized with the support of the Sobel family, this exhibition marks the first time her major paintings have been reunited in over seventy years.

A selection of works on paper further expands the exhibition by demonstrating her approach to drawing, with a series of parallel linear strokes that knit foreground and background together into dense, interlocking patterns.

Credit: Overview from museum website