Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita Sher-Gil (born January 30, 1913, Budapest, Hungary—died December 5, 1941, Lahore, India [now in Pakistan]) was a painter who was one of the pioneers of the modern movement in Indian art.

Sher-Gil was born of an Indian father and a Hungarian mother. She had a precocious talent for painting that was noticed early, and she was encouraged in her pursuit by her uncle, Ervin Baktay, an Indologist and a former painter himself. During her childhood she lived at different times in both India and Europe. At 16 she entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she was influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, and Paul Gauguin. In 1934 she left Paris—where she had begun to have some success as an artist—and returned to India, inspired by the notion that her future as a painter lay there.

In India, Sher-Gil’s first effort was to find a mode of delineation appropriate to her Indian subjects. Influenced in particular by the wall paintings of the Ajanta Caves in western India, she attempted to fuse their aesthetic with the European oil painting techniques she had learned in Paris. Her style was in marked contrast to that of her contemporaries—Abanindranath Tagore, Abdur Rahman Chughtai, and Nandalal Bose—who belonged to the Bengal school, which represented the first modern movement of Indian art. She considered the school retrograde and blamed it for what she called the stagnation that, in her estimation, characterized Indian painting of the time. An exceptional colourist, Sher-Gil was able to achieve special effects with colours that were unbridled and bold, in direct contrast to the pale hues in vogue among her contemporaries.

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In 1937 she set out on a tour of South India, a journey that shaped and molded all her future work. Her works from that period, her “South Indian trilogy” (Brahmacharis, South Indian Villagers Going to Market, and Bride’s Toilet), are startlingly different from the realist watercolour mode of Indian painting prevalent at the time. Those paintings represented her experimentation with form and were her first attempt at assimilating the tremendous impact made on her by the cave paintings of Ajanta as well as by those of Ellora.

In 1938 she returned to Hungary, where she married her cousin Victor Egan. The couple spent a year there and then moved back to India, settling in Saraya, a small village in what is today Uttar Pradesh, where an uncle of hers had an estate. Always willing to experiment, there she turned for inspiration to 17th-century Mughal miniatures, applying their sense of composition and colour to the formal system she had developed from the Ajanta paintings. In 1941 Sher-Gil and her husband moved to Lahore, where she died suddenly at the age of 28. Her last unfinished works reveal a move toward abstraction and incorporate colours even richer than those seen in her previous pieces.