Milky Way

Janet Sobel, 1945 · Gallery 522 · Floor 5

Brighton Beach, late 1930s. A grandmother in her forties picks up her son's paints. He's the one who wanted to be an artist. She'd raised five kids. Never took a class. Came over from Ukraine as a kid. A pogrom killed her father. Nothing in that resume says painter. Then she couldn't stop. Her name's Janet Sobel. She poured enamel. Tipped the canvas so it ran. Blew the wet stuff around through a tube. Look what that made. A pale web over the dark. Purple, blue, maroon under there. Big cream loops up top, like the rings a wet glass leaves on a bar. Yellow lace in the corners. Pink puddles down low. One black splat, off to the left, like a squashed bug. And thin white threads spraying off everything. That's probably where she blew on it. No center. No main event. Edge to edge. Milky Way, it's called. She signed it in cursive, lower left, like a check. Peggy Guggenheim hung her at Art of This Century, her gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street. Jackson Pollock saw her webs on the wall there. So did Clement Greenberg, the critic who championed Pollock. She got a solo show there in 1946. This one was in it. A reviewer said her pictures looked like marble, mother-of-pearl, spider webs and a spatter of milk. Then the story dropped her. Primitive, they said. A housewife. Turns out she was allergic to the paint. Tried to leave it alone. Couldn't, according to the Brooklyn Eagle. The family moves to Jersey. And by 1947, Pollock's making the drip paintings. The ones everybody knows. But years later, Greenberg lets something slip. He and Pollock had admired her paintings, he writes. "Rather furtively." Ya know, sneaking a peek at Grandma's stuff. He says hers were the first all-over paintings he'd ever seen. Paint carrying on right across the picture. Edge to edge. And Pollock? Admitted they'd made an impression on him. Then Greenberg gets to the next sentence. Pollock was already heading that way himself.

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