Born in the Ukraine in 1893, Janet Sobel was an American self-taught painter, whose work was championed by Sidney Janis, Peggy Guggenheim and William Rubin. Today she is widely considered to be the first Western artist to create abstract drip paintings.
Recent exhibitions include Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy, London (2016), Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2017), Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), and Action, Gesture, Paint at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023).