Person · Hungarian-Indian painter
Amrita Sher-Gil
Also known as Amrita Shergil, Amrita Sher Gil, Dalma-Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) was a Hungarian-Indian painter, born in Budapest to a Punjabi Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian-Jewish singer, trained in Paris and then deliberately turned towards India. After 1934 she studied Ajanta, Mughal and Pahari painting and set out to paint the lives of Indian villagers and women; critics in Bombay and Lahore called her the greatest painter of the century, but few bought her work. She died at twenty-eight in Lahore; her works are now National Art Treasures.
- Date
- 1913 – 1941
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Writing from Saraya, she claimed that Europe belonged to Picasso, Matisse and Braque while India belonged only to her. In 2023 her 1937 painting The Story Teller sold for $7.4 million, then a record for an Indian artist.
The cause of her death in December 1941 has never been established; a failed abortion and peritonitis have been suggested, and her mother accused her husband, Viktor Egan, of murder.
Connections (5)
- InfluencedAjanta caves
In 1937 Sher-Gil toured South India and, after visiting the Ajanta caves, made a conscious return to classical Indian art in her South Indian trilogy — Bride's Toilet, Brahmacharis and South Indian Villagers Going to Market. The Ajanta murals, with Mughal and Pahari painting, were what she studied when she came back from Paris in search of Indian roots, and they bridge her Post-Impressionist training and her mature work.
- InfluencedPahari painting
At Saraya near Gorakhpur, where she lived from 1938, Sher-Gil painted Village Scene, In the Ladies' Enclosure and Siesta. The Wikipedia account reads Village Scene as showing the influence of the Pahari school and the other two as experiments with miniature painting. The hill-state miniatures gave her a way to paint the rhythms of rural life outside the academic manner she had trained in, and Village Scene sold for 6.9 crore rupees in 2006.
- Associated withGaiety Theatre, Shimla
Sher-Gil's family moved from Budapest to Summer Hill in Shimla in 1921, and by the age of nine she and her younger sister Indira were giving concerts and acting in plays at Shimla's Gaiety Theatre. Shimla stayed the family base: the Summer Hill house is where she lived after returning to India at the end of 1934, and her 1934 portrait The Little Girl in Blue, of a Shimla cousin, sold for 18.69 crore rupees in 2018.
- Died atLahore
In September 1941 Sher-Gil and her husband Viktor Egan moved to Lahore, then a major cultural centre of undivided India, where she painted in a top-floor studio at Ganga Ram Mansions on the Mall. Days before her first major solo show there she fell ill, and she died around midnight on 5 December 1941 and was cremated in the city. The critic Charles Fabri had championed her from Lahore, and the Lahore Museum holds some of her paintings.
- Alternative toRaja Ravi Varma
When Sher-Gil travelled across India trying to sell her paintings, the Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad returned them and the Maharaja of Mysore chose Raja Ravi Varma's paintings instead. The two painters answer the same problem in opposite ways: Ravi Varma fused European academic technique with epic subjects for a mass public, while Sher-Gil used Post-Impressionism, Ajanta and miniature painting to paint ordinary villagers, and found almost no buyers in her lifetime.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Amrita Sher-Gil". Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life (2006); Vivan Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings (2010).
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