Who is Amrita Sher-Gil?
Amrita Sher-Gil was born on 30 January 1913 in Budapest in the Kingdom of Hungary, to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, an Indian Punjabi Sikh aristocrat from the Majithia family and a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer who came from an affluent bourgeois family.
At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter in Paris, first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Pierre Vaillent and Lucien Simon and later at the École des Beaux-Arts, from 1930 to 1934.
She drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Amedeo Modigliani, while working under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and through the company of artist friends and lovers like Taslitzky.
In 1931, Sher-Gil was briefly engaged to Yusuf Ali Khan, but rumours spread that she was also having an affair with her first cousin and later husband Viktor Egan. Her letters also reveal same sex affairs.
Sher-Gil’s early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting, more specifically, the Post-impressionism style.
Her work during this time include a number of self-portraits, as well as life in Paris, nude studies, still life studies, and portraits of friends and fellow students.
In 1933, Sher-Gil, began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India feeling in some strange way that there lay her destiny as a painter. Sher-Gil returned to India at the end of
1934.
In India, she began a quest for the rediscovery of the traditions of Indian art. She was influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and the cave paintings at Ajanta.
Later in 1937, she toured South India and produced her South Indian trilogy of paintings Bride’s Toilet, Brahmacharis, and South Indian Villagers Going to Market following her visit to the Ajanta Caves, when she made a conscious attempt to return to classical Indian art. Her subjects, often depict poverty and despair.
In September 1941, Egan and Sher-Gil moved to Lahore. Her studio was on the top floor of the townhouse she inhabited. Sher-Gil was known for her many affairs with both men and women, and she also painted many of the latter. Her work, Two Women, is thought to be a painting of herself and her lover Marie Louise. Her last work was left unfinished just prior to her death in December 1941.
In 1941, at age 28, just days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore, Sher-Gil became seriously ill and slipped into a coma. She later died around midnight on December fifth, 1941, leaving behind a large volume of work. The reason for her death has never been ascertained. A failed abortion and subsequent peritonitis have been suggested as possible causes for her death. Her mother accused her doctor husband Egan of having murdered her.
Besides remaining an inspiration to many a contemporary Indian artists, in 1993, she also became the inspiration behind the Urdu play Tumhari Amrita.
Sher-Gil was sometimes known as India’s Frida Kahlo, because of the way she blended Western and traditional art forms.
In 2018, at a Sotheby’s auction in Mumbai, Sher-Gil’s painting, The Little Girl in Blue, was auctioned for a record breaking 18 point 69 crores. This painting is a portrait of Amrita’s cousin Babit, a resident of Shimla and was painted in 1934, when the subject was 8 years old.
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