Titled, signed, dated, and inscribed verso: "'Mirage' / Love & Death / Mich West / 1983 / Composition"
Oil on canvas
50 x 35 1/2 in. (127 x 90.2 cm)

Provenance
The artist
Stuart Friedman
Emily Friedman Fine Art, Los Angeles
Private collection, Palm Beach, FL (Acquired from the above)

Description
In a journal entry in 1978, the artist Michael (Corinne) West recollected a memory of Jackson Pollock and Peggy Guggenheim visiting West at her studio. “Peggy,” West jot down, “thought I was painting ‘life.’” Indeed, her palpitating, gestural paintings – such as this present work Love and Death / Mirage – catch life on the wing without petrifying it. This exuberant canvas was painted over “a too-perfect abstract black and orange painting” as the artist explained in her private notes. The original black and orange brushstrokes peek out from under the tangle of icy blue and white slashes that transmute the thick of life into aesthetic form.

One of the few women artists who fully embraced Abstract Expressionism despite the movement’s overwhelming valorization of male artists, West (1908-1991) was a prolific first-generation Abstract Expressionist painter who was at the forefront of dialogues that shaped the movement. She had numerous exhibitions throughout her life, including at Centre, New York (1935) and Stable Gallery, New York (1951). However, the fiercely independent West (who had changed her name from Corinne to the more masculine Michael in an effort to be taken seriously as an artist) was forgotten over time, as she was largely indifferent to art world fame and its endless demands for self-promotion.

A student of Hans Hofmann and a close friend of Arshile Gorky, West (1908-1991) associated and exhibited with members of the New York avant-garde beginning in the mid-1940s. Though her early compositions closely resemble those of some of her peers, in the late 1940s and early 1950s West moved confidently into a more original aesthetic mode. In the mid-1950s, West moved into heavier, simpler gestural compositions, often limiting her palette primarily to black and white, with highlights of color. 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, West 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.

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. An important yet understudied artist whose work has been receiving renewed critical attention in recent years, West has been given exhibitions at The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center which mounted an acclaimed retrospective of her work in 1996, and the Georgia Museum of Art held a traveling exhibition of her work in 2007 and 2008.

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.