Amrita Sher-Gil is remembered for her profound exploration of artistic traditions from both the Orient and the Occident. Swayed by the artistic knowledge of Rabindranath and Abindranath, the pioneers of the Bengal School of painting, she embraced the technique of depicting women’s portraits from Rabindranath and the use of bright colours alongside chiaroscuro in her work. At the age of nineteen, she commissioned her first painting, establishing herself as one of India’s youngest and most pioneering women artists.
Early Life
Sher-Gil was born to an Indo-Hungarian couple in January 1913 in Budapest. Her father, Sardar Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, was an Indian Sikh aristocrat belonging to an influential family, and her mother, Marie Antoinette, a French-Hungarian Jew, was an opera singer in Budapest. Her strong paternal and maternal backgrounds provided her with a strong foundation and financial stability amidst the two World Wars. In 1921, she relocated to Shimla, which was in a better state than Europe, where countries were struggling with severe economic depression and the rise of fascism. Shortly thereafter, her mother enrolled her in the Santa Annuncita School in Florence, Italy. However, her tenure was brief; she was expelled for drawing nudes and openly opposing the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1929, on the advice of her maternal uncle Ervin Bakhtay, who recognised her artistic aptitude, she travelled to Paris to study art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillant and later with Professor Lucien Simon from 1931-33. By this time, she was able to differentiate between subjectivity and objectivity through torsos, nudes, still life, and self-portraits. During this period, she exhibited her renowned painting Young Girls, which won a gold medal at the 1933 Paris Salon and earned her an associate membership in the prestigious Grand Salon.
Influences
Her life swung like a pendulum between the two continents of Asia and Europe. The Europe of the mid-nineties was experiencing varied movements like Cubism, Fauvism and Chirico’s surrealism, but Amrita enjoyed them less. Rather, she greatly embraced the post-impressionist painters, Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin. Immersed in the artistic environment of Paris and supported by her ancestral fortune, she gained access to elite cultural soirees where leading artists and intellectuals gathered to exchange thoughts on contemporary art, literature, music, and fashion. Consequently, her paintings began to adopt a European idiom, characterised by a naturalistic approach and the deliberate application of textured paint. However, we see an immediate change or a cultural variation in her work after she permanently relocated to India in 1934. Scholars contend that her hybrid identity enabled her to become a perceptive observer of the indigenous spirit of subcontinental culture.
Amrita in India
Her return to India coincided with the decline of the Bengal School of Art, whereupon her work breathed new life into the region’s artistic landscape and marked the beginning of modern Indian painting. Sher-Gil’s deep involvement in the visual culture of India drastically changed her artistic vocabulary as a result of her exposure to Mughal portraits, Rajasthani paintings, Ajanta frescos, sculptures of the Gupta era, and Basohli and Kangra school of art. Amused with the colourful, textural and earthy beauty of India, she managed to incorporate classical Indian aesthetics and stylised forms into oil paintings of Europe. The works created in Shimla represent human figures in a forest background following Omar Khayyam style. In 1938, she married Dr Victor Egan and lived in Saraya, Gorakhpur, until she moved to Lahore in 1941. At the peak of her artistic development, she died at the age of twenty-eight in Lahore on December 5, 1941, from what is considered a wrongly performed abortion procedure.
Signature Works
In her famous painting Young Girls, Amrita Sher-Gil depicts a fascinating intercultural conversation between Eastern and Western cultures via the contrastive portrayals of her sister, Indira, and her partially naked French friend. While of comparable ages, the women are different from each other in their racial characteristics as well as body language: while Indira is sitting in Western clothes in the comfortable posture of the lotus position, her friend appears to be lying down in a dishabille manner. The dichotomy of the composition has been widely discussed by art historians in relation to Sher-Gil’s hybridity and the colonial power relations and gender ambiguity inherent in it.
The visit to South India which Sher-Gil made in 1937 marked the beginning of a new phase in her artistic work. Instead of just drawing on Indian traditions, she started to reinterpret them using her own modern visual style. Works like The Bride’s Toilet, Brahmacharis, and South Indian Villagers Going to Market show her interest in the monumental character and expressive simplicity found in Ajanta and temple art; the figures look solid but are at the same time restrained, and their serious expressions together with their large, expressive eyes give rise to a constant feeling of quiet melancholy. In The Bride’s Toilet, the ordinary situation of a bride getting ready is turned into an examination of female friendship and emotion; Brahmacharis, on the other hand, takes a wider approach to Indian social and cultural identity and reflects the intellectual climate of the nationalist period.
The emphasis that Sher-Gil places on the inner lives of her subjects is especially striking in Woman Resting on a Charpoy; in this painting she turns a domestic situation into a deeply psychological one. The woman lying down, who is surrounded by a strong presence of red, seems to be hanging between a state of physical stillness and emotional restlessness. By making use of the stylised approach found in Indian miniature painting, she employs simplified forms and colour to express a sense of longing and isolation. It is in this way that these works show how she developed her own particular artistic language by combining Indian visual traditions with European modernism.
Conclusion
Given that Amrita’s background is one of mixed parentage, her education at an art school located in Paris meant that she was at once a part of and apart from two worldviews. Her sexual orientation brought her even closer to her artistic genius, and she had to keep transforming her art and find a new visual language while she combined a modern attitude toward life with traditional art-historical thinking. The reality is that both cultures formed her style, and the importance of art is the way it united different worlds in her personality. The way in which Sher-gil understood and applied the nature of art determined the fact that she is one of the first contemporary artists in India who connected past images with the images of today, East and West, tradition and modernity, village and big city.