Tag Archives: How to Suppress Women’s Writing

She Transformed the Art World–and No One Knows About Her

Laurie and Debbie say:

Jackson Pollock, Marc Chagall. Names that resonate through the history of modern art: trailblazers, game-changers. Kelly Grovier, writing for the BBC, reveals the little-known story of the woman who not only preceded them, she also inspired at least Pollock. We have evidence.

Janet Sobel was born in Ukraine. She and her mother and siblings came to the United States in 1908, after her father had been killed in an anti-Semitic pogrom. She was 15. By 1938, she was a grandmother, starting to experiment with painting.

She was a natural. Without any instilled deference to rules that mustn’t be broken – and with the fearlessness of someone who had survived the traumas of religious persecution and the hardships of the Great Depression – Sobel unselfconsciously set about inventing art as if entirely from scratch. …

With no inculcated allegiance to any artistic school or prejudice regarding the appropriateness of materials, Sobel began playing both with what a painting can say and how it can say it. Using unconventional implements such as glass eye-droppers to squirt paint and the strong suck of a vacuum to drag wet splatters into thin gossamers that no traditional brush could spin, she assaulted the surface of canvases laid out on the floor, orchestrating a liquid lyricism of spills, splashes and spits the likes of which had never before been seen.

She could have done this in her living room, with herself and her family and friends as audience, but her son Sol (whose temporary interest in painting may have been what got her started) made it his business to get her work into the world,

 reaching out to everyone from Chagall himself to the influential art collector Sidney Janis, who would prove instrumental in establishing the reputations of everyone from Willem de Kooning to Mark Rothko to Pollock.

By 1944, Sobel was well on her way to being a formidable fixture in the New York art scene, debuting that year with a solo show at the Puma Gallery on 57th Street – an exhibition that yielded widespread praise for her works’ “astounding sophistication” and “absolutely unrestricted” imagination.

The legendary Peggy Guggenheim featured her work in a group show and a solo exhibition at Guggenheim’s gallery. And that’s why we know where Jackson Pollock got his ideas:

… the art critic Clement Greenberg admitted to visiting the exhibition with Pollock and that the two “noticed one or two curious paintings shown at Peggy Guggenheim’s by a ‘primitive’ painter, Janet Sobel (who was, and still is, a housewife living in Brooklyn)”. Putting to one side Greenberg’s derisory instinct to belittle the status and achievement of Sobel (“curious”, “primitive”, “housewife”), what he goes on to acknowledge places beyond doubt the enduring significance of the encounter: ‘Pollock (and I myself) admired these pictures rather furtively… The effect – and it was the first really ‘all-over’ one that I had ever seen… – was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him.”

In 1945, Sobel was using the “drip technique” that Pollock has gotten credit for for almost 80 years — and he started using it in 1947.

So if Sobel was prominent, and getting excellent reviews (if sometimes condescending ones) before anyone else used these techniques, why don’t we know about her. That, sadly, is another very common women’s story:

In 1946, the same year that she opened a solo show at Guggenheim’s Art of the Century gallery, her husband Max, moved the family from Brooklyn to Plainfield, New Jersey, in order to be nearer to his costume jewellery enterprise. Unable to drive, Sobel quickly found herself cut off from the ebb and flow of the art scene in which she had only just become an important player.

Compounding that geographic disadvantage was the decision taken the following year by her biggest advocate, Peggy Guggenheim, to relocate to Europe, closing behind her the doors of the Art of the Century gallery – Sobel’s principal platform. Adding insult to injury, the onset of an allergy to an ingredient in paint forced Sobel to turn instead to media such as crayons that were less conducive to the drip technique, all but forcing her to abandon the innovation entirely. By 1948, Janet Sobel, who would die in obscurity 20 years later, had effectively vanished from the art world.

Now she’s a footnote or — in the case of Grovier’s article — an International Women’s Day special feature. The late Joanna Russ wrote the landmark How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Sobel’s story is a textbook example of how to suppress women’s visual art even — or especially — if it is genuinely transformative and changed the landscape of the art world forever.

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Joanna Russ: Brilliance and Articulate Rage

Debbie says:

Joanna Russ died last week. If you’ve never heard of her, then you don’t know that she wrote The Female Man, the most important feminist science fiction novel ever written (which, to me, means that it could be the most important science fiction novel ever written). She wrote a good deal of other fiction, almost every word of it feminist, and also a lot of incisive, hard-hitting nonfiction. Perhaps her most famous nonfiction book is How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

photo of Joanna Russ

Tributes are flying around the web. There’s an excellent collection of links here, most of which I still have to read. I’m struck by Paul Kincaid’s comment: “She wasn’t important. She was essential!”

That is certainly my experience. In 1973, when The Female Man was published, I was 21 or 22. I was just becoming a part of the science fiction community, where I have spent the last forty years. I was aware that feminism was in the air (if you asked, I would have said I believed in “women’s liberation”, which was the phrase of the time) but I had never read Betty Friedan or Kate Millett or Germaine Greer. I would have read them eventually, of course, but I read Joanna Russ right then, and so many things I had never understood fell into place, the way a kaleidoscope will fall into a perfect pattern.

I just opened my old and battered paperback of The Female Man at random, and found this:

I am a woman. I am a woman with a woman’s brain. I am a woman with a woman’s sickness. I am a woman with the wraps off, bald as an adder. God help me and you.

Open again, and find this:

I’ve never slept with a girl. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to. That’s abnormal and I’m not, although you can’t be normal unless you do what you want and you can’t be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn’t want to do, which isn’t normal.

So you see.

The Female Man is written from several voices. I think those two passages are from the same voice, but I haven’t checked yet.

In any event, this was a book that opened eyes, that changed minds (including my mind), that initiated fury and passion and activism and terror. A male friend of mine at the time said, admiringly, “That’s not a novel. That’s articulate rage.”

Joanna Russ is much more than The Female Man. She wrote fine novels and stories before that book and more fine novels and stories after it. “The Little Dirty Girl” just popped into my head as I wrote the last sentence. “Useful Phrases for the Tourist” is an early “phrase book” that gives you an idea of the alien civilization it was written for, is hilariously funny, and tells a story. Picnic on Paradise and other stories about Alyx created the female kick-ass heroine genre.

She was the first person to write about what we now call “fan fiction” (then “K/S” for “Kirk/Spock” and later “slash fiction”), a thriving, creative community made up almost entirely of women writing for women without the mediation of the (mostly male) publishing world. When she wrote about it, it consisted of a couple of hundred people. Now, the Organization for Transformative Works , which by no means represents all of fan fiction, has 170,000 stories by 16,000 people. I personally believe that fan fiction might never have blossomed, even with the Internet, if Joanna hadn’t turned her spotlight in that direction. I know she wrote her own fan fiction, and spent some time obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I only wish I knew what pseudonyms she used.

Personally, she was extremely difficult: demanding, didactic, unpredictably warm or hostile. Difficult enough that even if she were male, people would have thought she was difficult. But they would have cut her a lot more slack. My own face-to-face encounters with her were few: she was ungracious to me the first time I met her, and after that I tended to sit on the sidelines and listen, rather than engage. But I listened to some fine analysis, mostly about fan fiction. I can’t remember if I heard her say, “You can’t see around corners, but you can hear around corners,” or if Teresa Nielsen Hayden quoted that to me shortly after Joanna said it, but it stays in my brain.

She was plagued with health problems–bad back, allergies, and later chronic fatigue syndrome (which kept her from writing much)–none of which made her more pleasant or easier to be around. Friends who got close to her got slapped, which is another reason I stayed on the sidelines.

I’ve read most of the words she’s written under her own name, many of them over and over. Of course, no single person most shaped how I’ve lived my life and what I believe today, but if I absolutely had to pick one, she’d be a serious candidate.