For the past five years, New York’s Hollis Taggart gallery has been championing the work of Michael (Corinne) West (1908–1991), a little-known Abstract Expressionist woman painter whose life’s work was fortuitously rescued from a city auction when her estate went unclaimed.
Now, the gallery is presenting its most ambitious showing of West’s work to date, taking a deep dive into the artist’s archives to present reproductions of her writings and other documentation related to paintings on view in “Chronicling an Artistic Practice: Michael West Paintings and Archives From the 1950s to 1970s.”
A photo of Michael Corrine West with her painting (1963) at her solo show at Granite Galleries in New York. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
“We have photos, news clippings, notebooks, sketchbooks, a lot of stuff,” gallery director Kara Spellman told me at the show’s opening.
Spellman is currently overseeing the production of a catalogue raisonné of West’s work—something that could never have happened were it not for Stuart and Roberta Friedman, who fortuitously purchased a painting by West at a Westchester thrift shop in 1989. When they finally tracked down the artist to learn more about her, they discovered she had recently died, and the city of New York was about to sell her estate.
Michael (Corinne) West, (ca. 1960s). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
The couple bought it all, some 110 paintings on canvas and 500 works on paper, in additions to the archives.
Since Hollis Taggart took over, all but about 40 of the paintings have been sold—but the gallery has been quietly buying up other West works, some of which are being sold for the first time in the current show, and considers its efforts to raise the artist’s profile as part of a longterm project.
Michael (Corinne) West, (1966). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
“I think it takes repetition to get an artist into limelight,” the dealer told me. “She’s a very important, undervalued, under appreciated artist—even now compared to other women artists of the same period who I see out there, like Lynne Drexler and Alice Baber who I don’t think are as important as she is, but have far greater market value.”
There are 14 oil on canvas works on view in the current show, priced starting at $45,000 for the 13-inch-tall , and up to $225,000 for the show’s only figurative painting, . (Most are between $100,000 and $165,000.) Works on paper range from $4,500 to $6,500. The artist’s auction high of $176,400, according to the Artnet Price Database, was set in 2022 at Sotheby’s New York, for roughly double the painting’s presale estimate. (Before 2019, her work had only hit five figures three times.)
Michael (Corinne) West, (1952). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
West was one of Hans Hoffman’s first students at New York’s Art Students League in 1932. In the hopes of being taken seriously by the art world, she even adopted the male name Michael—she was born Corinne—at the suggestion of her close friend Arshile Gorky, who is said to have proposed to her, unsuccessfully, no less than six times. (West instead married war photographer and experimental filmmaker Francis Lee.)
Gorky’s love letters to West were—until Hollis Taggart became champions of her work—the main reason her name was known to art historians and scholars. Another was photographs of West by her friend Richard Pousette-Dart.
“Chronicling an Artistic Practice: Michael West Paintings and Archives From the 1950s to 1970s” at Hollis Taggart, New York. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
But West was much more than a muse. Not only an artist in her own right, she was also a prolific writer and poet with strong opinions about art and creativity.
West’s “Notes on Art,” which she began keeping in the 1940s, identified the burgeoning Ab Ex movement as “The New Art” in 1948. She could also be quite cutting—one entry describes “third rate realism displayed in gold frames [that] looked like someone had just cleared the attic.”
Michael (Corinne) West’s archives include this note in which she writes critically of a realism exhibition. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
“She had a lot of humor—a lot of comments about a lot of different styles of art,” Spellman said. “She was constantly seeing shows.”
The archives, which the gallery hopes sell to a U.S. museum also include West’s written records of her day-to-day life. There is her diary about going to see the doctor or needing to pay the rent—something that was often a struggle for West.
“She would write, ‘I got an eviction notice again. Do I pay rent or do I buy paint?’” Spellman said.
For while West was very much a part of the New York School, and was a working artist throughout her life, she never had a true breakthrough moment. Sadly, a solo show at a major New York gallery eluded West her entire career.
Michael (Corinne) West, (1963). Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
At times, West had seemed at the cusp of receiving greater recognition for her work. She was in a 1945 Pinacotheca Gallery exhibition that included artists such as Mark Rothko and Milton Avery. And in 1953, was part of the well-known Stable Gallery’s second annual exhibition alongside such luminaries as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell.
A career highlight was a studio visit from Jackson Pollock and Peggy Guggenheim, which West wrote of in her diary.
“Peggy told her that she paints life,” Spellman said.
Michael (Corinne) West’s recollections of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York mention a studio visit from Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
But Guggenheim never exhibited West’s work. In 1957, the artist had an exhibition in the city at Uptown Gallery, followed by a 1958 outing at Domino Gallery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. In the 1960s, she had two New York shows, at Granite Galleries and Imaginary Art, with her final exhibition in 1978 at the city’s Womanart Gallery. (Posthumously, West had a show at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton in 1996 and New York’s Art Resource Group in 2010.) But other opportunities failed to materialize.
“She was asked to show in Paris, but with the expenses, she couldn’t pull it together,” Spellman added.
A flyer for Michael (Corinne) West’s final solo show during her lifetime, at New York’s Womanart Gallery in 1978. Photo courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York .
Nevertheless, West estimated that she sold some 40 paintings, a slow but steady stream of sales that made it possible for her to continue working even as Pop art supplanted Abstract Expressionism as the leading art movement. Though her health declined following a series of strokes in her later years, West made work until the end, with her last drawing dated to 1991, the year of her death.
“She was just very dedicated,” Spellman said, “to making art.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
