Description
A painter and poet of great spirit and vitality, Michael (Corinne) West produced explosive, highly gestural Abstract Expressionist works. Described by Dore Ashton as an “exaltée—someone impassioned, overwrought, and sometimes seized by delirium,” West committed herself to a life
of art and voraciously assimilated a wide variety of influences into her oeuvre. (1)
In the mid-1930s, West, like her contemporaries Lee Krasner and George (Grace) Hartigan, adopted a masculine name to obfuscate her gender. Perhaps encouraged by her mentor and close friend Arshile Gorky’s name change, she initially chose the Russian-sounding name, Mikael, but later Anglicized the spelling. Fiercely independent and driven, West sought respect based on the merit of her work, free from the bias of gender.
A student of Hans Hofmann and a close friend of Arshile Gorky, West associated and exhibited with members of the thriving New York avant-garde scene beginning in the mid-1940s. Automatism—the practice of producing art or writing by accessing one’s unconscious thoughts and desires via a meditative state—was a central part of West’s creative process. In the late 1950s, the artist began a series of “Automatic Paintings” based on this Surrealist principle.
Throughout her career, West returned often to the reductive black and white palette as a powerful means of expressing fundamental aesthetic concepts. West was familiar with the prominent painters of the period, among them Picasso, Gorky, de Kooning, and Franz Kline, who created masterful works in black and white. Writing about her own monochromes she noted, "The Black and Whites are Romantic constructions based on a cubist concept of space—yet have a vitality of their own—centers pull away from triangles, rectangles are open ended, bisecting forms close to them and even the ‘totem motif’ is supported and held up by a base that is smaller than the rest but explodes into swift open-ended form." (2)
Born in 1908 as Corinne West, she spent most of her formative years in Ohio, first in Columbus and later in Cincinnati. There she attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before enrolling the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1925, after opting for a career in the fine arts. Allured by the promise of the big city, West relocated to New York in 1932, continuing her art education the following year at the Art Students League under Hans Hofmann, though she quit after six months as she felt his following was too cultish. West exhibited the “totem” series at Woman Art Gallery in New York in the 1970s. The artist’s work has received critical attention over the past six decades, including exhibitions at Art Centre, NY (1935), Stable Gallery, NY (1953), Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center (1996) and a traveling exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art (2007-08).
1. Dore Ashton, “On Michael West,” in "Michael West: The Automatic Paintings," exh. cat. (New York: 123 Watts Gallery, 1999), n.p.
2. Michael West, "Line and Space" 1966. Notebook entry, Michael West Archives.