A portrait, The Little Girl in Blue , drawn by a 21-year-old Indian woman artist was auctioned for a record-breaking ₹18.69 cr., by the Sotheby’s in Mumbai, last year. The creator is Amrita Sher-Gil, a pioneer of India’s modern art. Her works have been declared as National Art Treasures by the Government of India. Most of her paintings adorn the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Sadly, her paintings were largely unsold while she was alive.
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Amrita Shergil was born in Budapest in 1913, to the Hungarian-Jewish opera singer Marie Antoinette Gottesmann and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and a Persian and Sanskrit scholar. When she was young, she would get the house help to model for her and she would paint them.
Amrita began taking formal art lessons when she was eight, when her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, in north India. A year on, she, along with her younger sister Indira, was giving piano concerts and acting in plays at Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre in Mall Road. In Shimla, Amrita lived a relatively privileged lifestyle. At one point, she was thrown out of school for being an atheist. At 16, she moved to Paris and continued studying art, first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later at the École des Beaux-Arts.
Her 1932 painting Young Girls received a gold medal in 1933 at the Paris Salon. She painted women going to the market, women at a wedding, women at home. Sometimes, she showed women bonding with other women. At times, the works seemed to convey a sense of silent resolve. It was unusual depictions of Indian women at a time when portrayals tended to cast them as happy and obedient.
The avant-garde artist travelled to various countries including Turkey, France and India, deriving heavily from their art styles and cultures. She drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, while working under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon.
Amrita’s art was influenced by the paintings of the two Tagores, Rabindranath and Abanindranath, and the Mughal school of painting besides the Ajanta cave paintings.
A revolutionary, her lifestyle was carefree.She married her Hungarian cousin Dr. Victor Egan.
In 1937, she visited South India and was deeply moved by the plight of many villagers and unprivileged people. This started reflecting in her works such as Brahmacharis , Bride’s Toilet and South Indian Villagers Going to Market . These paintings represented her experimentation with form and were her first attempt at assimilating the impact made on her by the cave paintings of Ajanta.
Many plays and novels including Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh were inspired by her. Budapest’s Indian cultural centre has been named after Amrita, who died young at age 28 in Lahore. She has since wielded significant influence on a number of modern day greats.
