A Woman Named Janet Sobel Was Drip-Painting Before Pollock — He Saw Her Work in 1944

Most people who can name one Jackson Pollock can name the technique: drop the canvas on the floor, dilute house paint until it pours, and use sticks, hardened brushes, and basting syringes to fling and trail it across the surface. Pollock practiced this method in a converted barn in Springs, on the eastern end of Long Island, from 1946 until his death in 1956. The paint was usually Duco or Devoe and Reynolds enamel, thinned to a viscosity ordinary oil paint cannot reach. The horizontal canvas was practical: house paint runs on a vertical surface; on the floor, gravity pulls drips into pooling spirals.

What Pollock didn't invent is the technique itself. Janet Sobel, a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant working out of her Brooklyn kitchen in the early 1940s, was producing all-over drip paintings before Pollock. Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century, gave Sobel a solo show in 1946; Pollock visited it that year with his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, and the critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg later wrote that the visit influenced Pollock's pivot to the dripped canvases that became his signature. Sobel, who worked in a domestic setting and was often described in print as a "housewife," was systematically written out of the canon for decades.

The public version of Pollock — paint mid-air, cigarette in mouth, body twisting over the canvas — comes almost entirely from a single 1950 photo essay by the German émigré Hans Namuth. Namuth shot Pollock at work for several weeks in Springs and produced both the famous still photographs and a brief color film. The film made Pollock as a celebrity; it also, Pollock later said, broke the spell of his own working method.