A painter and poet of great spirit and vitality, Michael (Corinne)
West produced explosive, highly gestural Abstract Expressionist works.
Described by Dore Ashton as “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 late 1950s, the artist began a series of “Automatic Paintings,” based on
the Surrealist principle of accessing the unconscious mind; it is these works
for which the artist is perhaps best known today.



A student of Hans Hofmann and a close friend of Arshile Gorky, West 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. The artist began to rework earlier, more colorful
gestural abstractions with heavy accumulations of neutral-colored paint. The
resulting surfaces are rough and layered, almost geological. The violence with
which West finishes these canvases alludes to her anxiety over Cold War
politics and nuclear proliferation, “reflecting her dismay about the prospects
for global annihilation as a result of a nuclear holocaust.” (2)



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. West was likely introduced to the principle of
automatism by Surrealist expatriates who had immigrated to New York in the
period surrounding World War II. Deeply influenced by Surrealist writers, such
as André Breton and Isidore Ducasse, West also turned to those who had inspired
the Surrealist authors; the French poet Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud provided
the artist with rich symbolic associations to mine for her paintings, and
offered her ripe fodder for her own poetry. In 1947, West created a suite of
poems entitled “Automatic Illuminations” in clear homage to Rimbaud, the author
of Illuminations.



West experimented with the materiality of her works, alternating pouring paint
directly on the canvas to produce spatters and drips with carving out swaths of
paint with a brush or palette knife. Her interest in alchemy and cosmic
relations also led her to incorporate a variety of incidental objects,
including pencils, nails, sand, and other debris, into her compositions. She
was also among the first painters to allow pigment to stain unprimed canvas.
Art scholar Walter Maibaum credits West with the development of this technique,
claiming she predated Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland in
her adoption of staining. (3)



Born in 1908 as Corrine 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. A member of Hans Hofmann’s first
class at the League, West credits her instructor as a lasting influence on her
art. Hofmann’s emphasis on the “inner eye,” the ability to apprehend the
essence of things, guided the artist in her spiritual approach to abstraction,
long after she had sought out other teachers and mentors.



Another prominent figure in her life, and one with whom she would develop an intimate,
romantic relationship, was the artist Arshile Gorky, whom she met through a
class monitor at the League, Lorenzo Santillo. West and Gorky spent countless
hours visiting local museums, in particular the Metropolitan, and discussing
art. Gorky introduced the younger artist to important sources for West’s work,
such as European Surrealism. West avidly read the work of Breton and Ducasse,
and drew on their celebration of the operations of the unconscious mind in her
art.



In the mid-1930s, West, like her contemporaries Lee Krasner and George (Grace)
Hartigan, adopted a masculine nom de brosse. Perhaps encouraged by Arshile
Gorky’s name change, she initially chose the Russian-sounding, 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.



Gorky’s emphasis on drawing remained an important model for West’s work. His
study of the Old Masters encouraged West’s appreciation of the linear approach
to painting (the disegno model of the Raphael tradition), and their visits to
museums only furthered the development of West’s own art. A series of works she
produced in the late 1940s revealed how she wielded the paint brush to
translate the process of drawing to painting.



Following the dissolution of her marriage to her first husband Randolph Nelson,
in 1935 West moved to Rochester, New York, where she participated in the
Rochester Arts Club. Her Portrait of Manuella garnered critical praise when she
exhibited it at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery that same year. In the late
1930s and early 1940s, West exhibited repeatedly in solo and group exhibitions
in Rochester; several of her works draw the favor of the press, among them a
series of drawings on view at the Rochester Fingerlakes Exhibition in 1943.



In 1946 West moved back to Manhattan, and became active in the thriving postwar
artistic culture of New York City. She married, in 1948, the avant-garde
filmmaker and photographer Francis Lee, giving birth to her only child, Lionel
Sardofontana Lee, the following year. As frequent host to a number of
Surrealist exiles in New York, Lee forged connections to artists such as Joan
Miró and Robert Motherwell, as well as to influential critics like Harold
Rosenberg. Possibility as a result of such soirées, West made the acquaintance
of fellow artists Jackson Pollock and Richard Pousette-Dart, with whom she
shared an emphasis on the painterly process as well as the affirmation of a
spiritual essence within the universal language of abstraction. Like
Pousette-Dart, eight years her junior, West sought to convey “‘the Door to a
Spiritual World’ through the ‘Creative fire’ of art.” (4) Her works from this
period reveal pictographic grids and loosely abstracted forms with vague
references to the outside world; often working directly from the tube, these
paintings exhibit exquisitely wrought surfaces, built up with thick impasto and
worked with a palette knife to create what Pousette-Dart referred to as “a
material awareness of spirit.” (5)



Inspired by the philosopher Henri Bergson’s belief in the interconnected nature
of all living things, West developed an aesthetic philosophy she termed “new
mysticism in painting.” In a 1946 essay, she described her negotiation of 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 if the individual
can penetrate the nature of our mystic universe.” (6)



West’s move to New York also brought the artist increased opportunities for
exhibiting her work. She showed at the Rose Fried Gallery in 1948 and three
years later at the Stable Gallery. In the late 1950s, West received a solo
exhibition at the Uptown Gallery, New York, and also at the Domino Gallery in
Washington, D.C. Her one-person show at the Uptown Gallery received praise for
its energy and vitality, drawing comparisons to Pollock’s work.



In 1976 West suffered a stroke, although this did not prevent her from
continuing painting; instead, she seemed to appreciate the release from the
pressures of exhibiting it afforded her. In 1981, she expressed her commitment
to her art: “No more shows—I just want to paint in peace—As this drive to paint
forces me on.” (7) Five years after her death in 1991, the Pollock-Krasner
House Foundation mounted an acclaimed retrospective of the artist’s work,
entitled Michael West: Painter-Poet.



1. Dore Ashton, “On Michael West,” in Michael West: The Automatic Paintings,
exh. cat. (New York: 123 Watts Gallery, 1999), n.p.

2. Joan Marter, “Missing in Action: Abstract Expressionist Women,” in Women of
Abstract Expressionism. (New Haven: Yale UP in association with Denver Art
Museum, 2016), 24.

3. Walter Maibaum, “Michael West: The Automatic Paintings,” in Michael West:
The Automatic Paintings, n.p.

4. Quoted in Michael West: Painter-Poet (East Hampton, N.Y.: Pollock-Krasner
House and Study Center, 1996), 9.

5. Ibid.

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

7. Michael West, “Notes on Art,” 1981, quoted in Michael West: Painter-Poet, 5.