b'Michael (Corinne) WestMichael West (19081991) was born Corinne Michelle West in Chicago, Illinois. She attended the Cincinnati Art Academy before moving to New York in 1932, where she enrolled in the Art Students League and studied with Hans Hofmann. Among her peers at the school were the artists Louise Nev-elson, Betty Parsons (later well-known as a gallerist), and Mercedes Matter (later the founder of the New York Studio School). When Arshile Gorky advised West that she would not be taken seri-ously as an artist under her real name, she first exhibited under and then actually took the name Michael West. As early as 1946, she developed what she called a lyrical Cubist style, resembling Jackson Pollocks work of the time and constituing a move toward a more vitalistic abstraction, a fusion of matter and form. West was an intellectual painter, interested in current developments in art, literature, and philosophy in both Europe and the United States. She was an avid reader and wrote poetry as well as theoretical texts. Her paintings are expressive and dramatic. Like Franconia Notch, with its nervous, calligraphic brushstrokes, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is full of raw and almost aggressive energy, the colorblack and white with some blue and redhaving been applied and scraped off with a palette knife.Exhibited in :Epilogue : Michael Wests Monochrome Climax, organized by Hollis Taggart, New York, April 29May 31, 2021Literature /Press :Epilogue : Michael Wests Monochrome Climax, essay by Ellen G. Landau, in Epilogue : Michael Wests Monochrome Climax, New York : Hollis Taggart, 2021, illustrated in color, pp. 4243 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1967Oil on canvas148 151.8122.2 cm'