Michael West

Corinne Michelle West was born in 1908 in Chicago. She attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before turning to painting, studying at the Cincinnati Art Academy in the late 1920s and graduating around 1930. She then moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League under Hans Hofmann beginning in the early 1930s and later studied privately with Raphael Soyer. During this period she began signing her work as Michael, a name change several sources attribute to the encouragement of the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a close personal relationship; multiple accounts note that she declined his repeated proposals of marriage.

West remained active within the first generation of the New York School through the following decades, though she achieved little of the recognition given to her male peers. She died in 1991 in her apartment and studio on the Upper West Side of New York City. Documented accounts describe her as living in obscurity and financial hardship in her final years; she left no will, and the city took custody of her estate because no heirs came forward.

Five years after her death, in 1996, the Pollock-Krasner House Foundation mounted a retrospective of her work. Art Resource Group organized a further exhibition in 2010. Her estate remained largely outside the market until Hollis Taggart, New York, took over its representation in 2019, since which time her work has been the subject of renewed gallery exhibitions, including Space Poetry: The Action Paintings of Michael West (2019) and a survey of her paintings and archives from the 1950s.

West's critical standing has shifted from near-total obscurity during her lifetime to active reassessment today. Galleries and art press now describe her as a trailblazing but historically underrecognized pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, placing her within the same New York milieu as Gorky, Hofmann, and other first-generation members of the movement. Recent essays accompanying her gallery exhibitions, including coverage of her later monochrome paintings, have focused renewed critical attention on a body of work that went largely unseen during her lifetime.

West's auction market is thin but has strengthened markedly since her estate came under gallery representation in 2019. Her recorded auction high, according to the Artnet Price Database, is USD 176,400 for a painting sold at Sotheby's New York in 2022, reported as roughly double its presale estimate; the specific title of that work is not confirmed in publicly available reporting. That figure surpassed an earlier record of USD 81,250, set in 2019 by Shadows of "Forgotten Ancestors" (1967) at Sotheby's New York, which had itself replaced a prior high of USD 27,500 set in 2009. The trajectory across those three benchmarks points to accelerating demand, though the number of public sales remains small.

West's market remains small in volume, so any single auction result should be read with caution rather than as a stable price trend. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, which places added weight on estate and gallery provenance; works are best verified through Hollis Taggart, which has represented her estate since 2019. Her deepening museum presence and the recent rise in her auction benchmarks suggest a market still in the early stages of institutional and collector rediscovery.