Remembering a rebel

This year marks the 80th death anniversary of India's iconic painter Amrita Sher-Gil who gave modern Indian painting its authentic voice and vision.

When she breathed her last around midnight of December 6, 1941 in Lahore (part of the then undivided India), Amrita Sher-Gil was just 28. The exact cause of her death remains largely unknown.

Three decades after her demise, art critic Richard Bartholomew wrote: “Amrita is still the legend she was. She died young. No woman painter since her time was so beautiful as she was or has created such handsome work… Beautiful, passionate, young, and a painter, she opted to give Indian painting a lead at a time when decadence was rife both in the European style painting in India and in the revivalist schools of Indian art… During 1935-41, Amrita gave modern Indian painting its authentic voice and vision… In her best works, there is a pristine quality, which is timeless.”

Born in Budapest on January 30, 1913 to an aristocrat Sikh father and Hungarian-Jewish opera singer, Amrita spent the first eight years of childhood in Hungary before her family moved to Shimla. When she was 16, she went to Paris and remained there for five years as a student of art. “Although I studied, I have never been taught painting,” she reminisced in an article in 1936, “because I possess in my psychological makeup a peculiarity that resents any outside interference.”

On her return to India in 1934, she faced several dilemmas. Scholar K G Subramanyan points out that while the physical situation (sensual delight in the sights and sounds of rural India) exhilarated Amrita, the human situation (poverty and misery) moved her. “This probably explains why in the first body of work she did in India she prevaricates between its sensuous and suffering image, trying to imbue her sensuous figures with sad and vacant looks and mollifies the suffering ones with a decorative quality.”

Rich humanism

As she travelled extensively, Amrita was greatly impressed by the rich humanism of Ajanta's mural paintings. Later, she was struck by the compositional intensity and stylisations of Mughal, Rajput, and Jain art. Her own paintings absorbed these inspirations, while her subjects remained mostly the Indian women; their daily lives; the gloomy conditions they were situated in; their suppressed desires; their sense of solitude, seclusion, boredom and resignation. “I realised my artistic mission,” she explained in an article, “to interpret the life of Indians and particularly of the poor Indians pictorially, to paint those images of infinite submission and patience; to depict their angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness, to reproduce the impression their sad eyes created on me.” Amrita’s occasional, but charged nude studies were striking in form and content. In her several self-portraits, she could be seen to be joyous and thoughtful, by turns.

“It was a hard world in which Amrita was to find her destiny as a painter,” observed Bartholomew. “There was no modern painter of her calibre before her... There has been no Indian painter after her who has surpassed her achievement in what she set out to do, that is, to make contemporary Indian painting appear modern and yet spring from and reflect Indian antecedents.”

Amrita’s personal life was very exciting and not without its share of scandals. She took many lovers before and after her marriage (in 1938) to Dr Victor Egan, her Hungarian first cousin. She saw marriage as a way to gain independence from her parents. She was also disenchanted with the drabness of the middle-class environment she lived in. Her tongue was sharp, never hesitating to express her feelings openly and often brutally. “Amrita was so outspoken that she antagonised many,” noted Bartholomew. “Her contemporaries considered her a curiosity, a kind of hothouse flower of mixed culture. She was isolated and she pined for warmth, understanding, and friendship.”

Abrupt end

Amrita’s life ended abruptly just days before her first major solo show in Lahore. Today, majority of her works in the public domain are with the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. Dr Egan reportedly gifted 45 paintings to the NGMA on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s personal request. (Nehru and Amrita knew each other well; he attended her exhibition in Delhi in 1937; she once admitted not having painted Nehru’s portrait because he was ‘too good-looking’!)

The Government of India has declared Amrita and eight other artists whose paintings were to be treated as national treasures (others being Raja Ravi Varma, Gaganendranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Nicholas Roerich and Sailoz Mukherjee). Last year, well-known director Mira Nair revealed her intention to make a biopic based on Amrita’s life.

Amrita’s paintings have remained active in auctions commanding very high prices. In 2006, her painting 'Village Scene' (1938) set a record when it was auctioned for Rs 6.90 crore in Delhi. In March 2015, a rare self-portrait by her sold for $2.92 million in Sotheby’s New York auction. In 2018, her ‘Little Girl in Blue’ (1934) went for Rs 18.7 crore at the Sotheby’s auction in Mumbai. On July 14 this year, her ‘In the Ladies’ Enclosure’ (1938) fetched Rs 37.8 crore at Saffronart’s sale in Mumbai. This is the highest achieved by the artist in an auction and the second-most expensive artwork by an Indian (after V S Gaitonde’s Untitled /1961).

Booker-prize winning author Salman Rushdie wrote in 2007: “Amrita Sher-Gil's is an art which moves naturally towards the melancholy and tragic, while keeping its eye fixed firmly on high ideals of beauty. She was denied old age, bleak or otherwise, but neither her exuberant, magnificent self, nor the work it made, contained anything for which she needed to apologise. Time has passed, and her art endures.”