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14 November 2014

Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita Sher-Gil (30 January 1913,[1] – 5 December 1941), was an eminent Indian painter born to a Punjabi Sikh father and a Hungarian mother, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo,[2] and today considered an important woman 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]

Early life and education[edit]

Amrita with her sister Indira, 1922
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, Hungary[6] to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and a scholar inSanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoniette Gottesmann, aJewish opera singer from Hungary. Her mother came to India as a companion of Princess Bamba Sutherland.[7][8]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.[9]
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.[10] Though she was already painting since the age of five she formally started learning painting at age eight.[10]
In 1923, Marie came to know an Italian sculptor, who was living at Shimla at the time and in 1924 when he returned to Italy, she too moved to Italy along with Amrita and got her enrolled at Santa Annunziata, an art school at Florence. Though Amrita didn't stay at this school for long, and returned to India in 1924, it was here that she was exposed to works of Italian masters.[11]
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),[12][13] she drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin,[14] 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 practiced in the Bohemian circles of Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, she made her first important work, Young Girls, which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever[15][16] and the only Asian to have received this recognition.[11]

Career[edit]

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 the same year.[17] She began a quest for the rediscovery of the traditions of Indian art which was to continue till her death. It was also during this period that she pursued an affair with Malcolm Muggeridge.[18] 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.[14] She was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and the cave paintings at Ajanta.
Amrita Sher-Gil in her studio inShimla, photographed by father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, 1937.
Later in 1937, she toured South India[14] and produced the famous South Indian trilogy of paintings - Bride's Toilet, Brahmacharis and The South Indian Villagers 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.[19] By now the transformation in her work was complete and she had found her 'artistic mission' which was, according to her, to express the life of Indian people through her canvas.[1] While in Saraya Sher-Gil wrote to a friend thus: “I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque.... India belongs only to me”.[20] Her stay in India marks the beginning of a new phase in her artistic development, one that was distinct from European phase of the interwar years when her work showed an engagement with the works of Hungarian painters, especially the Nagybanya school of painting.[21]
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 in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. Thus began her second phase of painting which equals in its impact on Indian art with the likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy of the Bengal school of art. The 'Calcutta Group' of artists, which transformed the Indian art scene in a big way, was to start only in 1943, and the 'Progressive Artist's Group', with Francis Newton Souza, Ara, Bakre, Gade, M. F. Husain and S. H. Razaamong its founders, lay further ahead in 1948.[2][22][23] Amrita's art was strongly influenced by the paintings of the two Tagores, Rabindranath and Abanindranath who were the pioneers of the Bengal School of painting. Her portraits of women resemble works by Rabindranath while the use of chiaroscuro and bright colours reflect the influence of Abanindranath.[24]
It was during her stay at Saraya that she painted the Village Scene, In the Ladies' Enclosure and Siesta all of which portray the leisurely rhythms of life in rural India. Siesta and In the Ladies' Enclosure reflect her experimentation with the miniature school of painting while Village Scene reflects influences of the Pahari school of painting.[25] Although acclaimed by art critics Karl Khandalavala in Bombay and Charles Fabri in Lahore as the greatest painter of the century, Amrita's paintings found few buyers. She travelled across India with her paintings but the Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad returned them and the Maharaja of Mysore chose Ravi Varma'spaintings over hers.[26]
Although from a family that was closely tied to the British Raj, Amrita herself was a Congress sympathiser. She was attracted to the poor, distressed and the deprived and her paintings of Indian villagers and women are a meditative reflection of their condition. She was also attracted by Gandhi's philosophy and lifestyle. Nehru was charmed by her beauty and talent and when he went to Gorakhpur in October 1940, he visited her at Saraya. Her paintings were at one stage even considered for use in the Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.[20]
In September 1941, Victor and Amrita 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 on the top floor of the townhouse she inhabited. Amrita was known for her many affairs with both men and women[17] and many of the latter she also painted. Her work Two Women is thought to be a painting of herself and her lover Marie Louise.[27]
In 1941, just days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore, she became seriously ill and slipped into a coma,[17] and later died around midnight[19] on 6 December 1941, leaving behind a large volume of work, and the real reason for her death has never been ascertained. A failed abortion and subsequent peritonitis have been suggested as possible causes for her death.[28] Her mother accused her doctor husband Victor of having murdered her. The day after her death England declared war on Hungary and Victor was sent to jail as an enemy national. Amrita was cremated on 7 December 1941 at Lahore.[26]

Legacy[edit]

Sher-Gil's art has influenced generations of Indian artists from Sayed Haider Raza to Arpita Singh and her depiction of the plight of women has made her art a beacon for women at large both in India and abroad.[29] The Government of India has declared her works as National Art Treasures,[2] and most of them are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.[30] A postage stamp depicting her painting 'Hill Women' was released in 1978 by India Post,[31] and the Amrita Shergill Marg is a road in Lutyens' Delhinamed after her. In 2006, her painting Village Scene sold for  6.9 crores at an auction in New Delhi which was at the time the highest amount ever paid for a painting in India.[25]
Besides remaining an inspiration to many a contemporary Indian artists, in 1993, she also became the inspiration behind, the famous Urdu play, by Javed Siddiqi, Tumhari Amrita (1992), starring Shabana Azmi and Farooq Shaikh.[32]
Her work is a key theme in the contemporary Indian novel "Faking It" by Amrita Chowdhury.[


Daughter of a Sikh aristocrat, the beautiful Amrita SherGil (1913– 41), sailed with her Hungarian mother toFrance to study art in Paris when she was only sixteen year old. She learnt first at the Grande Chaumiere under Pierre Vaillant and subsequently at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where she was taught by Lucien Simon.

Sher-Gil returned to India at the end of 1934, not yet twenty-two, but already a technically accomplished painter, equipped with some of the most essential ingredients that make an artist great – an unquenchable thirst to know, a virile tenacity of purpose and a single-mindednesss about her role in life. Sher-Gil sought to come to terms with her Indian heritge – being only half Indian, she must have known that she would never have an insider’s view of India or be able to claim a full share of its psyche.

While still a student in Paris, she wrote in a letter how 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’. This was a remarkable statement for a twenty-year-old half-Indian woman, however westernized, to make in 1933. In those days, women of her background did not have vocations or careers; only lower-working-class women had jobs, and they were menial. Few Indian girls had an advanced education of any nature and those who did never took up a profession or employment, let alone declared their independence in such an unusual way as by becoming an artist. By her age, most women had been relegated to wedlock through the normal channel of an arranged marriage, and many had borne a couple of children. A casual remark by one of her Beaux-Arts tutors about her palette being more suitable for the colours and light of the East – as has been suggested by her nephew, the artist Vivan Sundaram – was all that it took to impel the impressionable girl, barely out of her teens, to long to hasten ‘home’.
Sher-Gil’s statement was a powerful indication of her intent, revealing the passion and the fire behind it. And, upon her return to India late the following year, she lost no time in getting to grips with her ambition. In Paris she may have been thirty years behind the European art movements and current trends, as hinted at by Sundaram, but she was certainly as many years ahead of her time in India in the mid-1930s – only in the 1960s did Indian artists begin to display her kind of self-assurance and purpose.
She went to live in Simla, the fashionable summer capital of the Raj in the Himalayan foothills, where her liberated lifestyle caused a stir. She began painting poor hill people who, to her romantic and naïve mind, embodies the spirit of India. She gave them large doleful eyes and vacant stares, exuding an expression of utter hopelessness. Her lanky and angular figures shrouded in homespun materials look fragile and melancholic, reflecting, perhaps, an inner melancholy of her own. The freshness and originality of Ajanta and Ellora, the sensuous murals of the Mattancheri Palace in Cochin and the strength of the Kushan sculpture which she saw at Mathura, began to characterize her work. She became acquainted with Indian miniatures and fell in love with the intense Basohli school. She even attempted to include certain elements of Rajput painting in her later work, doing so with feeling and flair and avoiding Abanindranath’s sentimentality.
Sher-Gil has been accused of neither having any political awareness, nor identifying with the national struggle for independence which was entering its final phase during her last years. What, perhaps, she did not know was that she would not live long enough to see how soon these strengths would rejuvenate Indian art.

Achivement
The name ‘Amrita Shergill’ stands out prominently amongst the modern painters of India. She was the youngest and only Asian artist to be elected as an Associate of the Grand Salon, Paris. She was the 'most expensive' Indian woman painter as well. Amrita is sometimes also known as India’s Frida Kahlo. She was very much influenced by the impressionists. She altered the face of Asian art and set a course for women artists. Her works echo the beauty and brilliance she possessed. In the following account, you will find the achievements of Amrita Shergill painted in various shades.

Early Life of Amrita Shergill

Amrita Shergill was born in Budapest, Hungary on 30th January, 1913 to Umrao Singh Shergill Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and a Sanskrit and Persian scholar and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Jewish Opera singer from Hungary. As her life unfolds, we come to know that she spent most of early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay. He guided her and gave her an academic foundation to develop on.

Education of Amrita Shergill

In 1921, her family shifted from Hungary to Shimla. There Amrita developed an interest in the art of painting. Thus, she took tuitions from an Italian sculptor in Shimla. When in 1924, her teacher moved back to Italy, Amrita and her mother also followed him. In Italy, she joined Santa Anunciata, a Roman Catholic institute.
Amrita Shergil received exposure there to the works of the Italian masters, which furthered fanned her interest in painting. She received formal training of painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, under Lucien Simon. At that time, she was deeply influenced by some European painters. Her paintings mirror a strong influence of the Western modes of painting.

Career of Amrita Shergill

Amrita Shergil returned to India in 1934 and since then, began her never-ending journey in the field of Indian art traditions. In India Mughal miniatures schools and Ajanta paintings had a great impact on her. When she journeyed to the southern parts of India, the famous South-Indian trilogy paintings came into being by her brush and paint. She evolved her own distinctive style. According to her, it was basically Indian in spirit, subject, and technical articulacy. Now, her paintings took the villagers, the poor and beggars as subjects.

Famous Paintings by Amrita Shergill

Amrita Shergill’s gangling and sharp figures of the poor are cloaked in homespun materials. They look flimsy and forlorn. Perhaps, reflecting her inner glum. The originality and uniqueness of Ajanta and Ellora, the sumptuous murals at the Mattancheri Palace in Cochin and the power of the Kushan sculpture she saw at Mathura, portray her work. She became familiar with Indian miniatures and adored the passionate Basohli School. She attempted to embrace some elements of Rajput painting in her later works, with feeling and flamboyance.
One of her early paintings ‘The Torso’ was a skillful study of an undressed which was known for its intelligence of drawing and bold modeling. Amrita completed ‘Young Girls’ in 1933. During her time, India was just coming out of the Purdah age, obligatory during the Muslim rule. So, great courage was required to paint nudes and this she did boldly and beautifully. She was a non-conformist. She painted herself gracefully in the nude. These paintings are today’s art treasures. In the negotiation, she blazed a radical trail which has served as a guiding light to other Indian painters.
It is said that she didn’t identify with the national struggle for independence. The reason can be perhaps, she didn’t know that she would not live long enough to witness how soon that power would revivify Indian art.

Awards, Achievements and Legacy

Amrita Shergill was amongst the most gifted Indian artists of the pre-colonial era. Her works reproduce her unfathomable passion and sense for colors. Her profound understanding of the Indian subjects can also be seen in her paintings.
The Government of India declared her illustrious works as National Art Treasures. The National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi is adorned by a majority of Amrita’s paintings. Also, there is a road known as the Amrita Shergill Marg in Lutyen's Delhi.
A postage stamp was released in 1978 in India which depicted her painting 'Hill Women'. She inspired a number of contemporary Indian artists. It was in the year 1993 that a renowned Urdu play ‘Tumhari Amrita’ (1992) by Javed Siddiqi came into being. Her work is the main theme in the contemporary Indian novel ‘Faking It’ by Amrita Chowdhury.
Amrita Shergill’s life was filled with passion and color just like her canvasses. She lived life on her own terms, with exceptional ways. In 1938 Amrita married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Victor Egan. With him, she moved to her paternal family's home in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. Later, the couple shifted to Lahore. Prior to her untimely demise, she left behind a body of work that establishes her amongst the leading artists of the century and a wonderfully eloquent symbol of synthesis between the East and the West. Amrita Shergil left this world on December 6, 1941 but achievements of Amrita Shergill are eternal, splendid and intense. They are keeping her alive amongst us.
Colour Style- Amrita’s initial works reflected the academic style in which she was taught. But later, she started experimenting and tried representing the non-western body in her paintings. Her paintings had a lot of Gauguin’s influence. Most of her paintings reflected the rural side of India. She used an abstract style along with vivid colors influenced by European modernism to depict rural India. Her paintings showed tangible proximity of the figures in her paintings and extensive use of dark tones for the background.
When Amrita Shergill returned to India in 1934, she went on a never-ending journey to study and learn the traditions of Indian Art. She got majorly influenced by the Mughal art works and the Ajanta paintings. Her journey to South India led her to paint her famous South Indian trilogy - Brides toilette, Brahmacharis and the South Indian Villagers going to market.
Apart from the Ajanta style, Amrita was also fascinated by the Paharari, Mughal and Rajasthani styles. The miniature Mughal, Pahari and Rajasthani paintings of the medieval era were an artistic revelation for Amrita Shergill. In the Village Scene you can see her fascination of Pahari miniatures. In the painting, she portrays a group of village women who are engaged in daily chores such as, chatting with each other and nurturing their children. At one corner there is a basket of red chillis and a red sari on the other end. The women are covered in saris and their faces are in shadow, but each of the women’s body language is distinct. The painting shows a mix of both foreign and Indian artistic traditions. She always portrayed women in her paintings as individuals in their own right, vulnerable but at the same time strong and dignified. She loved painting women of rural India and their activities. Often in her paintings, you can find the confined lives of rural Indian women with jaded eyes and gloomy faces.
Amrita’s paintings showed her typical fascination for the color red and white. The color scheme she uses in her paintings is vibrant, vivid, intense and glowing. In many of her paintings, one thing was prominent - an exception use of whites. According to her, the use of white would effectively liven up a painting and would illuminate the entire canvas. The use of whites in her compositions just adds a lot of drama.
In three Girls, Hill Men and Hill Women, the depiction seems almost impersonal because she does not approach her subject in a narrative manner that would focus on a particular event, but she rather brings a scene come to life. The figures portrayed in her paintings, were slightly superimposed and are posed statically and silently, almost icon-like. The figures in her paintings render a meaningful moment.
After her southern expedition, her paintings became more grounded with everyday realities. Her later paintings were not overly romanticized or characterized by majestic poses, but were more relaxed and distant. Some examples are - The Swing, Woman at Bath and Woman Resting on Charpoy (all from 1940).
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