Amrita Sher-Gil’s artworks mainly depicted Western style and culture during the initial stages of her career but she gradually began to rediscover herself by depicting Indian subjects using traditional methods, says Uma Nair
Often referred to as India’s Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil, one of the most famous painters of India was known for aesthetically blending traditional and Western art forms. After 105 years of her birth, she still stands among the pioneers of modern art in the country as her works influenced and inspired a number of modern-day greats.
A child of international modernism rooted to traditions, her short life made an indelible impression on the Indian history of art. Born on January 30, 1913, in Budapest, she made paintings that were both of her time but transcended it.
She was the daughter of a Hungarian mother and Sikh father who fostered her creative spirit from a very young age. Her talent proved to be prodigious in the coming years. At 16, she enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, under the tutelage of the esteemed French painter, lucien Simon. In the first year, she won the first prize in the university’s portrait and still life competitions. The following year, in 1930, she exhibited alongside Tagore at his public artistic debut, in Paris. Over the next three years she would show her work at the Grand Salon, in Paris, where she was elected an associate and won a gold medal for her 1932 painting, Young Girls, and also at the Sale de Tuilleries, Paris. During her time in Europe, Sher-Gil experimented with various styles and artistic personae, coming into contact with work by post-Impressionist painters such as Cezanne, Modigliani, and Gauguin, which bore a strong influence on her work.
The European art world had treated Sher-Gil well, yet she felt a strong inclination towards India — a place she had only visited. As she noted, “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.”
She moved to India in 1934 and soon moved away from the more academic, realist traditions she had pursued in Europe, incorporating more Modernist visual vocabulary — heightened colours, bolder and more decisive lines, and flatter compositions. She even rejected the style of the Bengal School which was in vogue at the time, instead looking to older Indian traditions for inspiration, such as the cave paintings of Ajanta and Ellora and the 17th century miniaturist traditions of the Mughal dynasty.
Sher-Gil was particularly interested in the struggles of ordinary life, and in establishing ways of expressing the Indian experience that broke through the glossed-over, the picturesque gaze of the Orientalist West. “I am personally trying to be,” she wrote, “through the medium of line, colour and design, an interpreter of the life of the people, particularly the life of the poor and sad.”
Celebrating her achievements and contribution to Modern Indian art, the Indian Government recognised her as a National Treasure artist in 1976. The majority of her works are in the archives of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, and these are among the 172 documented works from the artist’s oeuvre.
In 1938 she went back to Hungary to marry her cousin, Victor Egan; the couple returned to India a year later. In 1941, she died as a result of mysterious circumstances. She was only 28.