Ukrainian American modernist Janet Sobel’s wartime imagery gains new relevance

Artist Janet Sobel, a pioneer of drip portray earlier than Jackson Pollock, has been gaining extra widespread consideration lately and, now, is the topic of a solo exhibition at New York’s Ukrainian Museum. The present, Wartime(till 2 September), options Sobel’s stirring primitivist work from the early Forties, which mirror her fears concerning the Second World Conflict and issues concerning the destiny of family members in her native Ukraine.

Peter Doroshenko, the Ukrainian Museum’s director, says he was “dumbfounded” when he encountered Sobel’s work practically 12 years in the past on the Museum of Trendy Artwork. On the time he was returning to the US from Kyiv (the place he had served because the PinchukArtCentre’s founding president), to take over as govt director at Dallas Modern.

“She was an artist I had by no means heard of, however the label stated Ukrainian,” says Doroshenko, who’s Ukrainian American, and curated Wartime. It was particularly placing, he says, as a result of main museums have been then unquestioningly figuring out Ukrainian-born artists similar to Kazimir Malevich as Russian. For the reason that onset of Russia’s warfare in Ukraine, that observe has come beneath scrutiny.

Sobel, who was born Jennie Olechovsky in Dnipro (then Katerynoslav) in or round 1893, fled from pogroms wherein her father is believed to have been killed, and with surviving relations got here to New York in 1908. She began portray at age 44, inspired by her artwork scholar son. In keeping with Doroshenko, her works from the time of the Second World Conflict are significantly related in mild of the present warfare.

“She had two sons who have been stationed in Europe through the Second World Conflict and [was] continually making an attempt to keep up a correspondence with different family members in Dnipro, and by no means listening to again from them,” he says. Dnipro is now incessantly beneath Russian bombardment.

The exhibition “begins out with a few of her earliest drawings, which have been very influenced by Ukrainian people themes, one thing that she remembered from Ukraine as a toddler, after which later noticed within the Ukrainian neighborhood within the East Village”, Doroshenko says. “She simply began drawing issues that she remembered and began intertwining it along with her actuality at the moment.”

Sobel’s work at all times had a powerful figurative part. “Even in essentially the most summary works, there was at all times one thing figurative—eyes, a face, a hand, a silhouette,” Doroshenko says. Sobel burst onto the New York scene with drip work, “mainly means forward of her time”, Doroshenko provides, and “different artists similar to Jackson Pollock infringed or type of cribbed her work’s model for their very own”. The artwork critic Clement Greenberg (a good friend of Pollock’s) described Sobel’s work as “the primary actually ‘all-over’ one which I had ever seen”.

Sobel’s artwork profession was transient. She largely disappeared from the New York scene to give attention to elevating her 5 youngsters and supporting her household’s jewelry enterprise, leaving minimal archival traces. She died in 1968.

Former New York gallerist Gary Snyder has championed her work since first displaying it in 2002. The works in Wartime are drawn from his personal assortment. Family members of Sobel’s who settled in Houston are loaning works for a 2024 present the Menil Assortment.Snyder says her full physique of labor is worthy of shut consideration, together with Surrealist work that have been recognized in Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim’s circle, and the wartime drawings.

“I used to be fascinated with this early work, and felt it was much less recognized, however I additionally was intrigued by all of those photos of warfare, and that grew to become a spotlight nicely earlier than I knew how poignant it is likely to be,” Snyder says.“A lot of what she painted is spilling out of her thoughts, her unconscious or her unconscious,” he provides, referring to the affect of Sobel’s childhood in Ukraine. “She is a toddler. She is beneath 14 years previous. Reasonably than it being an previous individual rendering youngsters, she is channelling the younger youngster she was.”

Modern artist Lesia Khomenko echoes Sobel’s expertise on the museum’s second stage in her personal solo exhibition, Picture and Presence (additionally till 2 September). Khomenko fled Russia’s invasion along with her younger daughter whereas her husband stayed to serve with Ukraine’s armed forces. 4 of her collection depicting numerous points of warfare, together with the brand new AJS collection (for “After Janet Sobel”), are on show.

Khomenko’s works deconstruct Socialist-Realist battle scenes by Soviet Ukrainian artists and addresses warfare and our on-line world in addition to her expertise of battle and evacuation. Within the AJS collection, she is in dialogue with Sobel on the ruptures and resilience of Ukrainian historical past.

Khomenko, who just lately had her first US solo present at New York’s Fridman Gallery, felt “the sturdy connection between my observe and her technology”. She says this sense of connection was strengthened by studying Dore Ashton’s The New York Faculty: A Cultural Reckoning (1965), which highlights the position of immigrants in nurturing town’s Trendy artwork scene.

“I began to analysis her Second World Conflict interval of pre-abstract works and located lots in widespread with my very own observe,” Khomenko says. She positioned Sobel’s “troopers, simplified figuration, weapons” right into a separate canvas and folded them into tubes, in order that they “are each summary and referencing to black mortar weapons like in Sobel’s unique piece”, bridging generations of Ukrainian diaspora. She provides,“It’s two totally different histories and I am searching for a perspective to search out one thing that might unite all of it.”

Janet Sobel: Wartimeand Lesia Khomenko: Picture and Presence, till 2 September, Ukrainian Museum, New York