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, West associated and exhibited with members of the New York avant-garde beginning in the mid-1940s. 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)



“Untitled,” created in the early 1970s, is an example of West’s influential series of "totem" paintings from the 1970s that feature thick, calligraphic black marks, evoking hieroglyphics. This work, however, differs from other “totem” paintings in its use of blue strokes in its background, rather than a neutral colored background. In the totem paintings, West explored the concept of an abstract icon, creating lattice-like forms that refer to the Cubist grid structure as well as to natural imagery such as tree branches or even a standing figure. The references to calligraphy suggest West’s awareness of Kline's compositions as well as her interest in Buddhism. West's paintings, however, are expressive of her own aesthetic philosophies, which were influenced by metaphysics, in particular the writings of Henri Bergson. Inspired by Bergson’s belief in the interconnected nature of all living things, West developed an aesthetic philosophy that she termed “new mysticism in painting.” In a 1946 essay, she described her negotiation between the surface world of appearances and the immutable core essences of being: “The outer world changes as our thoughts change although our thought is usually ahead or in advance of the world viewed materially. To disintegrate visual unity… to break up and change outer appearance is necessary [for] the individual [to] penetrate the nature of our mystic universe.” (3)



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.

3. Michael West, “Notes on Art - The New Mysticism in Painting,” c. 1946, quoted in Michael West: Painter-Poet, p. 4.

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