Corinne Michelle West

Corinne Michelle West (1908–1991) was an American painter; she also used the names Mikael and Michael West. She was an Abstract Expressionist. She attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before moving to the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1925. She graduated from the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1930.

West moved to New York in 1932. After graduating and leaving the teachings of Hofmann, in 1934, West began studying under Raphael Soyer. She was Arshile Gorky's muse and probably his lover, although she refused to marry him when he proposed several times. In 1946, after returning to New York from Rochester, she exhibited at the Pinacotheca Gallery alongside Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. West – on June 30, 1948, in Manhattan – married filmmaker Francis Lee; they divorced in 1960.

In the 1960s and 1970s, West held three solo exhibitions at the Granite Gallery, Imaginary Art, and Woman Art Gallery, all in New York. Her style in these years became more experimental, with West exploring collage, calligraphy, and staining techniques. The first major West Coast exhibit of her work was held posthumously at Art Resource Group's Newport Beach, California gallery in 2010. Kelly Grovier described Blinding Light as "one of the most daring, uncompromising and innovative paintings to emerge in the [twentieth] century", and said that it is one of the "most intriguing plot points" of American modern art.

This is where West’s Blinding Light looms so powerfully in the story of 20th-Century art – how it succeeds more radically and unflinchingly than more celebrated works created around the same time. Unlike works by her better-known male contemporaries such as Richard Pousette-Dart's Comprehension of the Atom, Crucifixion (1944) or Jackson Pollock’s Shimmering Substance (1946), West’s complex canvas is not content merely to represent symbolically the spiritual implications of nuclear physics... it’s apparent that the artist is not attempting to distill from detonation a lyricism of rhythm or harsh harmonies from explosive chaos. These are actual abrasions. Real violence. There is a brutal authenticity to West’s painting... — Kelly Grovier, BBC October 2020

In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.