Rago Auctions

Born in Chicago in 1908 and raised in Ohio, the lesser-known but highly accomplished Abstract Expressionist painter, poet, and art theorist Michael (Corinne) West graduated from the Cincinnati Art Academy before moving to New York City in 1932. At the Art Students League of New York, West explored various art forms under the guidance of notable instructors like Hans Hofmann and Raphael Soyer. She also took courses in commercial art at the Traphagen School of Fashion. During the 1930s and 1940s, West's early works reflected Cubist and Neo-Cubist styles until she fully embraced Abstract Expressionism and shifted toward action painting in the 1950s.

While she knew many of the prominent Abstract Expressionist painters in New York, like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, West was not part of the core group of artists associated with the movement. West's marginal position was in large part a function of her being a woman. Painter Arshile Gorky, for whom West was a muse and close friend, advised her to change her name to Mikael (which later became Michael), but that only helped expand her profile slightly within the mid-20th century art world. Gorky also proposed to West several times, but she rebuffed him in each instance, sensing that he needed a female benefactor who could mother his children.

Along with being an overlooked Abstract Expressionist painter, West is also commonly grouped with the New York School of artists and writers. She was inspired by French existentialist Henri Bergson's notion of 'living energy' and this influenced her emphasis on action painting. While Pollock and others are justly credited with changing the course of art history, West also made a radical innovation herself. In the 1950s, she chose to efface an earlier work, Harlequin (1946), with a series of slashes and dull silver paint to evoke a bomb casing and suggest the process of nuclear fusion, as the Cold War had just begun. In retrospect, this layered, dynamic composition captured the spirit of the age perfectly.

In tandem with painting extensively for most of her life, West wrote poetry and essays on art theory. She was circumspect about her lack of acclaim and meditated on this in her writing as well as her art practice. Although she exhibited widely from the 1940s through the 1970s, she was more obscure thereafter, even though her style continued to evolve as she incorporated elements of collage, calligraphy, and other mediums. Five years after West's passing in 1991, the Pollock-Krasner House on Long Island held an initial retrospective of her work. The first major retrospective focused on West did not take place until 2010 at the Art Resource Group's gallery in Newport Beach, California, but more exhibitions have lately been staged to recognize her importance as an artist since New York-based gallery Hollis Taggart took over West's estate in 2019.