Exhibition of women abstract artists debuts at WAM

Before there was Jackson Pollock, there was Janet Sobel.

Pollock became well known outside of art circles for splashing, pouring and flicking paint onto canvases. Some even considered him the inventor of what became his signature technique.

But in 1938, nearly a decade before, Sobel, a Ukrainian grandmother who’d come to the U.S. as a teen to escape antisemitism, was creating paintings in a similar manner in her Brooklyn apartment. A 2022 BBC story called Sobel “the woman written out of history.”

The current featured exhibition at the Wichita Art Museum draws attention to Sobel and other women artists such as Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, who were often overlooked as innovators in the abstract expressionism, or AbEx, movement that started in America and then got international attention.

AbEx art focused on emotional and personal expression following World War II and subsequent turbulent events, with works featuring large brushstrokes, free-flowing gestural marks or broad areas of color.

On view at WAM through Nov. 16, “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” showcases about 50 paintings created from the early 1940s through the 1970s by 32 women.

All the works are from the Christian Levett Collection, housed in his Female Artists of the Mougins Museum near Cannes. France, open since summer 2024. Several years ago, the British-born collector pivoted from collecting antiquities that he’d previously displayed in the museum to collecting works of 19th- and 20th-century women artists.

WAM is the first U.S. museum to host the exhibition, which will go on to four other U.S. museums. The American Federation of Arts organized the show.

Ellen Landau, a respected AbEx scholar and Case Western University emeritus art professor, curated the exhibition. While she’s written about and researched Pollock, she’s also the writer of Krasner’s catalogue raisonné, a comprehensive, annotated listing of an artist’s entire body of work. Levett worked with her to produce a book in 2023 with the same title as the exhibition.

“One of the really special things about the show is you really get to see the evolution of these artists and can follow their careers through the exhibition,” said Tera Hedrick, an art historian and WAM curator. “There are (artists) that were really important in the day and had widely exhibited but not subsequent years … artists who have had less written about them and less scholarship.”

Artists like Sobel. Or Miriam Shapiro, who early in her career created AbEx works but then shifted to making collages celebrating women.

Some have had a bit of history shine on them, like Elaine de Kooning, whose husband, Willem, is among the well-known male AbEx artists. She became more familiar to Americans after being commissioned in 1962 to produce a painting of John F. Kennedy, while he was still in office, for the Harry A. Truman Library. She went on to paint several portraits of Kennedy, including one that is part of the National Portrait Gallery. Several of her AbEx pieces are part of the exhibition.

The exhibition also has multiple pieces by Hartigan and Frankenthaler. For a local tie-in, WAM added the Hartigan and Frankenthaler pieces it owns to the “(im)permanent collection” exhibition that rotates works from the museum’s collection. The works

The exhibition is arranged in four sections that show the progression of the AbEx movement both chronologically and geographically. The first section shows early works of women AbEx artists, several of them immigrants, based in New York City. An untitled work by Sobel is one of the first visitors will see.

The other sections cover subsequent years and show how the movement spread to California, Europe and influenced other movements.

‘Abstract Expressionism: The Women’ exhibition

What: a touring exhibition of more than 50 artworks created from the early 1940s through the 1970s by 32 women who played significant roles in abstract expressionism, the first global art style that started in the U.S.

Where: Wichita Art Museum, 1400 W. Museum Blvd.

When: through Sunday, Nov. 16. WAM hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, with extended hours until 9 p.m. on Fridays. Closed Mondays, Tuesdays and federal holidays.

Admission: $12, free for WAM members, college students with ID and youth 18 and younger

More info: 316-261-4921, wam.org

This story was originally published September 8, 2025 at 2:37 PM.