-https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220307-janet-sobel-the-woman-written-out-
In 1938, a Ukrainian-born grandmother created one of art’s biggest shocks – but it was attributed to the US painter Jackson Pollock. For International Women’s Day, Kelly Grovier explores the influence of Janet Sobel.
This is the way the story has always been told: in 1947, Jackson Pollock, the pioneering American painter whose rugged name rhymes with the verve of his virile persona, finally lost patience with the fussy finesse of careful brushstrokes that had defined art history. Chucking his bristles and easel aside, he grabbed some sticks and started flinging paint directly on a canvas he’d stretched out on the floor. With a flick of his wrist while galloping around the work like a ranch hand roping a rampant calf – not so much painting a passive image as lassoing an untamable one – Pollock had hit upon a fresh new mode of energetic artistic expression, one with muscle and swagger befitting the wild west of his Wyomingite birth and the wide, dry lightning plains of his unbridled psyche.
“During the summer of 1947,” Camille Paglia writes in her excellent survey of milestones in the history of image-making, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, “there was a major breakthrough: he invented his signature ‘drip’ style, which would transform contemporary art.” Pollock’s was an instinctive, shoot-from-the-hip technique that didn’t painstakingly plot its next move – rather, one that grabs a bottle, takes a swig, wipes its lips on its cracked knuckles, and couldn’t care less who’s watching. This is painting free from form and formalities, the kind of painting that only an American, a real American, could invent.
