Corinne Michelle West

Corinne Michelle West was born in 1908 in Chicago, Illinois. She first studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before enrolling at the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1925, from which she graduated in 1930. In 1932 she moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League, joining Hans Hofmann's first class there and later studying with Raphael Soyer, and also took commercial art courses at the Traphagen School of Fashion.

By the mid-1930s she was signing paintings "Mikael," and around 1940 to 1941 she adopted the name "Michael West," a change several sources attribute to advice from Arshile Gorky meant to help her work be judged without the gender prejudice facing women artists of the period. Working in New York through the 1940s, she was part of the milieu that produced Abstract Expressionism, and in 1946 she exhibited at the Pinacotheca Gallery alongside Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.

West continued painting, and writing poetry that she paired with her canvases, describing herself as a "Painter-Poet." She remained largely outside major gallery and museum programming during her lifetime. She died in 1991 in New York City, in her apartment and studio; her estate went largely unclaimed for a period afterward, and accounts of her rediscovery note that the city nearly disposed of the paintings left behind. In 1996, five years after her death, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center mounted a retrospective, "Michael West: Painter-Poet," which began the slow process of institutional reassessment that continues today.

Because West exhibited rarely and mostly outside major institutions during her lifetime, dedicated criticism from the period is scarce in the accessible record. Recent reassessment has come primarily through gallery and museum texts rather than independent newspaper or magazine critics. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has described her as "a trailblazing yet underrecognized force in the rise of Abstract Expressionism in New York," and Gazelli Art House has called her "an unsung pioneer of New York's Abstract Expressionist movement." The consistent theme across these institutional accounts is recovery: a documented participant in the Abstract Expressionist circle whose gender and name change kept her out of the standard histories, now being reintegrated through exhibitions, museum acquisitions, and estate representation.

West's auction market is thin and largely a product of recent rediscovery rather than a long sales history. Artnet's price database reports her auction high at USD 176,400 for a painting sold at Sotheby's, New York, in 2022, roughly double its presale estimate; the exact sale date and the work's title are not documented in the sources available. A separate 1908 to 1991 abstract work by the artist sold for USD 52,500 at Shannon's Fine Art Auctioneers in a fall sale, giving a sense of the range beneath her record. Since 2019, Hollis Taggart's exclusive representation of the estate and a run of gallery exhibitions have been the main engine of visibility for her work, and her market history remains too short and too sparse for a reliable long-run price trend.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for West, so provenance and attribution rest on Hollis Taggart's stewardship of the estate and on the biographical record built up since the 1996 Pollock-Krasner retrospective. Her market is genuinely thin: a single documented auction high, a handful of other five-figure results, and a concentrated run of gallery shows since 2018 rather than a long, continuous sales history. Collectors should also be alert to the artist's name variants, she signed and exhibited primarily as "Michael West" or "Michael (Corinne) West" for most of her career, which affects how works are catalogued and searched across auction databases.