As previously mentioned, during Sobel's career she was not at all recognized as an artist in her own right. First and foremost, she was considered simply to be a domestic housewife who took up painting as a hobby. This belief was upheld during her lifetime and perpetuated by leading art critics, such as the leading Abstract Expressionist critic Clement Greenberg. He described her work as purely “primitive” and that of a “domestic housewife,” while praising Jackson Pollock for these same techniques.
Although Greenberg did not consider Sobel to be a force in the art world at the time, the leading patron of the arts Peggy Guggenheim noticed Sobel's work and decided to include it in her The Art of This Century gallery in 1945. Jackson Pollock, himself, visited this gallery and ultimately admitted that Sobel's work “had made an impression on him”. Unfortunately for Sobel, she was often overshadowed by her male counterparts as the Abstract Expressionist movement was male-dominated. Consequently, the time has forgotten her as the true creator of the “drip painting” technique that Jackson Pollock has become so well-known for.

Untitled, 1941