‘Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.’

Proud declaration by Amrita Sher-Gil in 1938, with characteristic boldness, way she wanted to see her as the first truly modern Indian painter.

A scion of Indian Sikh aristocracy, Umrao Singh was a nationalist, independent scholar with philosophical interests, and an eccentric, somewhat Tolstoyan figure in appearance. Celebrated artist Amrita Sher-Gil was the elder daughter of Umrao Singh and his Hungarian wife Marie Antoinette. Born in Hungary, Hungarian was her first language, was brought up on Magyar Folk tales. Bela Bertok had been the previous occupant of one of the apartments in the building the Sher-Gil family lived in.

Amrita’s formal training in art began in 1929, when she was admitted to “Ecole Nationale des Beau Arts” (after a brief stint at the Grande Chaumiere) in Paris. Became proficient in French and the ways of bohemian Paris. Mentally agile - as she was sensually alert and avid, over the next four years she won many prizes, was elected as associate member of the Grand Salon and gained recognition as a talented figurative painter. Amrita had followed a disciplined life not to let the distractions of Paris impact her creativity in a massive way. Amrita Sher-Gil was adept in a form of figurative painting that, for all its academic antecedents, was not unrelated to the various strands of realism. The European dimension in her- gave her the option to choose Paris as her workplace, which could have easily been Budapest. In December 1934 Amrita returned to India, to her family home at Shimla. She chose India to find herself as an artist who will evolve over the time, although her father thought that staying back in Europe would be better idea for her. Amrita’s view was: ‘I must avow that I was somewhat hurt by the reason you give for wishing us to stay on in Europe,’ in a letter she wrote to her parents in September, 1934. ‘I was rather sad to realize that you place the conservation of your good name above your affection for us’…

‘I wish to return primarily in the interests of my artistic development. I now need new source of inspiration and here you will perceive Duci [Amrita’s Hungarian diminutive for her father] how utterly mistaken you are when you speak of our lack of interest in India, it’s culture, it’s people, it’s literature all of which interest me profoundly and which I wish to get acquainted with and I think I will find it in India. Our long stay at Europe has aided me to discover as it were, India. Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical, but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe I should perhaps never [Have] realized that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musee Guimet is worth more than the whole of the Renaissance!’

She, with an attitude and sentiment to keep other ideas away was distinct in the article published in 1936 entitled ‘Evolution of My Art’, where she clearly stated: ‘Although I studied, I have never been taught painting in the actual sense of the word, because, I possess in my psychological make-up a peculiarity that resents any outside interference. I have always, in everything, wanted to find out things for myself,’ However, Sher-Gil later recalled, an attitude that was certainly conducive to someone as allergic to instruction as she made herself out to be. Yet she did not escape the academic tenets that came with a Beau Arts education, as she herself acknowledged once she had returned to India.

She indeed threw herself into travelling and rediscovering classical Indian medieval art. She painted most of her best known works in the following six years- a period of prodigious creativity that was cut short due to fatal illness. Amrita died in Dec 1941, at the age of 28.

The artist extraordinaire in her short but experiential life had versatility and range of interests which further reveals her sensitivity towards aesthetic, social, emotional and psychological aspects. Her artistic eyes always searched and discovered relevance of modernism within Indian reality.

A persona like Amrita Sher-Gil is hard to decipher in it’s appropriate context. While her legendary presence within the art sphere in India has remained alive for decades, though her identity, her works continue to be raised and discussed, yet they appear to be insufficient. Her engagement with sexuality and Bohemian lifestyle can be interpreted as signature to her short but passionate existence.

With the gift of inquisitive and thoughtful, self-evaluating mind - it was full of provocative contradictions, as regularly found on her thematic and pictorial depictions, best evidences however, are the letters she wrote, which are not only thought provoking but also ruminative.

Amrita Sher-Gil did interpret the life of Indians, notably the common ignored Indians, through her brush, painted images of infinite submission and patience. Her unbiased school of style of painting, she successfully developed her own pictorial language, mixing Western and Eastern traditions, responding according to her observations related to varied cultural and sociological influences those were prevalent within her short but colorful life. In her words ‘I’m an individualist, evolving a new technique, which, though not necessarily Indian in the traditional sense of the word, will yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit.’

Early career of Amrita was a usual beginning with oils, portraits and models from life in a largely academic style. Young Girls (1932) won her an Associated Membership of the Grand Salon, which was reflection of that period. Her younger sister posed for a number of paintings, among which Sleep (1933) was arguably the most seductive one. Few months prior to painting sleeping figures, Amrita visited Gallery of London, where she had encountered the paintings of Paul Gauguin. Gauguin’s stylishly simplified yet symbolically charged Tahitian Nudes became a source of inspiration to her, which she later portrayed through Self Portrait as a Tahitian (1934).

Amrita Sher-Gil was never existed within the Surrealist orbit, just like she had never ventured around various forms of Geometric abstractions prevalent in the 1930s. Postimpressionist Gauguin had certainly impressed Amrita. Sher-Gil’s time at the Ecole she spent to really evolve, which can be described as generic figurative style with a psychological twist, a synopsis of School of Paris categories: nudes, portraits, still lifes. She preferred to paint Models and subjects used to be from her inner circle, fellow students, friends, her sister and sometimes professional models too.

‘Towards the end of 1933 I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter. We returned at the end of 1934. My professor had often said that, judging by the richness of my coloring, I was not really in my elements in the gray studios of the West, that my artistic personality would find it’s true atmosphere in the color and light of the East. He was right, but my impression was so different from the one I had expected, and so profound that it lasts to the day. It was the vision of a winter in India – desolate, yet strangely beautiful – of endless tracks of luminous yellow-gray land, of dark – bodied, sad – faced, incredibly thin men and women who move silently looking almost like silhouettes and over which an indefinable melancholy reigns. It was different from the India, voluptuous, colorful, sunny and superficial, the India so false to the tempting travel posters that I had expected to see,’ that was her expressions.

The influence of early Indian sculpture, the earliest example of Indian art to which Amrita had been exposed, Frescos of Ajanta and Miniature painting had deep impact on her world of thinking. ‘vital, vibrant, subtle unutterably lovely’, she wrote in a letter after visiting Ajanta frescos.

Body’s sentience, delicacy of sensuality undulating rhythms producing forms glimpsed in the flickering light. The plasticity of the figures, tenderness of bodies and their classical poise with tonal equilibrium were the salient features she would attempt to translate in her own artistic language.

The other remarkable point of Amrita’s South Indian trip for the ‘sensualist of the eyes” as she described herself, was her Mattancheri Palace fresco influence, where she had visited to discover frescos of the seventeenth century. She had desired to be seduced, enthralled, transported by her discoveries- and not only art, the vivid south Indian landscapes played a huge roll. In a letter to her mother from Trivandrum she wrote: ‘The journey from Madurai to here was beautiful. The soil was ochre red, on it’s rich emerald green vegetation, coconut trees, banana trees, palm trees, small red thatched huts or red clay hovels… not a single European and no trace of European “civilization”.’ After returning to Shimla, she created the ‘south Indian trilogy’.

During her stay in Bombay, she did gather knowledge related to different Indian schools of art, like miniature painting, and that was her another eye opener after the frescos of Ajanta. It was to another facet of the Indian pictorial tradition that indeed excited her, leading to newer ideas and creations. The new path she delved was confirmed when change in scale or and choice of subjects were particularly visible. Less abstractionism, heavy influence of Pahari miniatures with condensed and color rich pictorial compositions were all around Amrita’s art world during this period.  

Amrita Sher-Gil opted for less majestic but comfortable attitude to the subjects she had selected on Indian context. As she proclaimed: ‘I want to achieve sonorous modulations of color and an unctuous texture,’.

Her interest in European painters was prominent instead of her enthusiasm for the Indian schools of art. Her passion for the Flemish master – Breughel the Elder was well known.

She was working on the painting before her untimely death in December 1941, and a clear indication was there that she was on the verge of a breakthrough in her language of painting which evolved over a period. Simplified forms, audaciously framed, distinct colorfulness were products of the view she had through her studio window in Lahore where she was settled during her last days.

 A major exhibition was scheduled, but she died unexpectedly – the cause still remains obscure. And she was only twenty-eight. The painting remained unfinished as was her project: she was on the threshold of becoming a truly modern Indian artist.