Salesforce Park November 11th, 2023
By Jessica Zack Nov 12, 2024 - San Francisco Chronicle
Komal Shah stood in front of a small 1946 painting by Ukrainian artist Janet Sobel during a recent visit to the new exhibition “Making Their Mark: Works From the Shah Garg Collection” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In the colorful untitled abstraction, an expressive figure can barely be made out through a skein of inky black drips and calligraphic swirls of lilac and aqua.
“I’ve always wanted to have this painting at the entrance,” said the Atherton art collector and philanthropist, who has amassed one of the preeminent collections of art by women artists.
Sobel, although practically unknown compared to Jackson Pollock, is now recognized as playing a pioneering role in the development of drip-painted abstraction. But Shah explained that when Sobel had a one-woman show in 1944 with gallerist Peggy Guggenheim, New York art critic Clement Greenberg called her work “housewife trash.” Greenberg, who coined the term “abstract expressionism,” admitted years later that Sobel’s paintings had in fact made a positive impression on him and on Pollock, who started drip painting two years later.
Pollock became a household name, while Sobel moved to New Jersey and fell into obscurity.
Shah said that Sobel’s story feels emblematic of the uphill battle countless women artists have faced to be taken seriously in the male-dominated field. This gender disparity has galvanized Shah and her husband, venture capitalist Gaurav Garg, as they’ve acquired close to 300 works by a who’s who of women artists from the mid-20th century to today.
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Greg