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| Born | January 30, 1913 Budapest, Hungary |
|---|---|
| Died | December 5, 1941 (aged 28) Lahore), British India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Field | painter |
| Training | Grande Chaumiere École des Beaux-Arts (1930-34) |
Amrita Sher-Gil (अमृता शेरगिल) (January 30, 1913 [1], – December 5, 1941), was an eminent Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo[2], and today considered an important women painter of 20th century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance [3][4]; she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India [5].
Today, she is amongst Nine Masters, whose work was declared as art treasures by The Archaeological Survey of India, in 1976 and 1979 [6], and over 100 of her paintings are now displayed at National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi [7].
Early life and education
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, Hungary [8] to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and also a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Jewish Opera singer from Hungary. Her mother came to India as a companion of Princess Bamba Sutherland.[9] Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters born. Her younger sister was Indira Sundaram (née Sher-Gil), mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. She spent most of early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay. He guided her by critiquing her work and gave her an academic foundation to grow on. He also instructed her to use servants as models. The memories of these models would eventually lead to her return to India.[10]
In 1921 her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla in India, and soon began learning piano and violin, and by age in nine she along with her younger sister Indira were giving concerts and acting in plays at Shimla's Gaiety Theatre at Mall Road, Shimla [11]. Though she was already painting since the age of five she formally started learning painting at age eight [11].
In 1923, Marie came to know an Italian sculptor, who was living at Shimla at the time; later in 1924 when he returned to Italy, Amrita's mother also moved to Italy along with Amrita, and got her enrolled at Santa Annunziata, an Art School at Florence, Italy Though Amrita didn't stay at this school for long, and returned to Indian in 1924, it was here that she was exposed to works of Italian masters [12].
At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter at Paris, first at the Grande Chaumiere under Pierre Vaillant and later at École des Beaux-Arts (1930–34) [13][14], she drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin[15], while coming under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and the company of artist friends and lovers like Boris Tazlitsky. Her early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting, especially as being practised in the Bohemian circles of Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, she made her first important work, Young Girls (see below), which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever [16][17] and the only Asian to have received this recognition hence [12].
[edit] Career
In 1934, while in Europe she "began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India,".. "feeling in some strange way that there lay my destiny as a painter", as she later wrote about her return to India, in the same year [18]. Soon she began a rediscovery of the traditions of Indian art which was to continue till her death. She stayed at their family home at Summer Hill, Shimla, for a while, before leaving for travel, in 1936, at the behest of an art collector and critic, Karl Khandalavala, who encouraged her to pursue her passion for discovering her Indian roots [15]; subsequently she was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and cave paintings at Ajanta Caves.
Later in 1937, she toured South India [15] and produced the famous South Indian trilogy paintings, Bride's Toilet', 'Brahmacharis' and 'The South Indian Villagers' [19] that reveal her passionate sense of colour and an equally passionate empathy for her Indian subjects, who are often depicted in their poverty and despair, by now the transformation in her work was complete and she had found her 'artistic mission', to express the life of Indian people through her canvas, as she herself admitted [1].
This was distinct from European phase, in the interwar years, when her work showed an engagement with the works of Hungarian painters, especially the Nagybanya school of painting,[20].
Sher-Gil married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Victor Egan in 1938, and moved with him to India, to stay at her paternal family's home in Saraya, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, thus began her second phase in painting, which equals in its impact on Indian Modern Art, with likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy of Bengal school of art, as the 'Calcutta Group' of artists movement, which transformed it later, in a big way, was yet to start in 1943, and the 'Progressive Artist's Group', with Francis Newton Souza, Ara, Bakre, Gade, M. F. Husain and S. H. Raza among its founders, laid further ahead in 1948, Bombay [2][21][22].
In September 1941, the couple moved to Lahore, then in undivided India, and a major cultural and artistic centre. She lived and painted at 23 Ganga Ram Mansions, The Mall, Lahore, where her studio was reported to be on the top floor of the townhouse, she inhabited [23]. She was also famous for her many affairs with both women and men [18].
In 1941, just days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore, she became seriously ill and slipped into a coma [18], and later died around midnight [19] on December 6, 1941, leaving behind a large volume of work, and a mystery behind the real reason for death has never been ascertained, something expected in view of the overly sensationalised accounts of Amrita's life in the words of her contemporaries. A failed abortion and subsequent peritonitis also have been suggested as the possible causes [24]. She was cremated on December 7, 1941 at Lahore [25].
Self Portrait as Tahitian
Sher-Gil encountered the paintings of Paul Gauguin during a visit to the National Gallery in London. Gauguin used expressive colour and stylised figures to represent life on Tahiti, and his work influenced Sher-Gil’s own depictions of the non-western body. In Self Portrait as Tahitian she self-consciously plays on her status as the exotic ‘other’ in metropolitan Paris. It is likely that she worked from a photograph.
South Indian Villagers Going to Market
In 1936-7, Sher-Gil undertook a trip through southern India, and saw the 7th and 8th century cave paintings at Ajanta for the first time. The large fresco-like paintings that followed capture her impressions of the south, but also represent her direct response to Ajanta, which she admired as a supreme example of classical Indian art. Here she brings a new sense of movement and colour to her depiction of Indian life, compared to the more static scenes that she portrayed at Shimla.
