Photo: KNMA—‘Picture courtesy: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket’
In a remarkable coincidence, Amrita Sher-Gil’s brief life
began the year Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature,
in 1913, and ended the year he died, in 1941. Wedged between these two
historic moments—these three decades also saw the flourishing of a high
modernist style in what is now known as the Bengal School of
Art—Sher-Gil remains one of the most discussed painters in modern India.
In her lifetime, she sold next to nothing, but posthumously she became
one of the most expensive Indian artists.
Although never quite mentioned in the same breath with
the masters of the Bengal School, her work, which drew inspiration from
Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin among others, had strong resonances with
the paintings of the two Tagores, Rabindranath and Abanindranath, the
pioneers of the Bengal School.
Sher-Gil’s brooding portraits of women
bear uncanny resemblances to those by Rabindranath, and her exquisite
use of the chiaroscuro, together with the boldness with which she
appropriated colours, brings to mind the nuanced style of the other
Tagore. But her art, now on display in the Capital, has an ever-present
quality of “yet-ness” to it, of a world teeming with possibilities which
were interrupted before they could mature into something rich and
strange.
Her life, on the other hand, in spite of its brevity, had
an incredible richness to it. Born to a Punjabi Sikh aristocrat father
and Hungarian Jewish opera-singer mother, Sher-Gil was fated to draw
attention to her origins. Her exotic beauty, noble lineage, intense
relationship with her father and series of affairs became the subject of
much gossip, and eventually impossible to separate from her artistic
persona. The art of Amrita Sher-Gil is still experienced through this
prism of biography and anecdotage, without enough attention being paid
to the art-historical milieu that nourished her imagination. Like Frida
Kahlo, with whom she is often compared, Sher-Gil perhaps attracts more
curiosity because of her troubled life and painful death than as the
harbinger of a distinctive approach in painting.
It is perhaps more proper to think of Sher-Gil as a
phenomenon than a genius. With the characteristic restiveness of the
young, she wanted to push the limits of her circumscribed world. Having
lived a full and anarchic life in Europe, she took the bold and
uncompromising step of moving back to India, arguing long and hard with
her reluctant father to support her and her younger sister Indira
(mother of artist Vivan Sundaram) in this adventure. “I wish to return
primarily in the interest of my artistic development. I now need new
sources of inspiration,” she wrote in a letter to her father, insisting
that their long stay in Europe had helped her “discover” India. In the
same letter, she writes movingly about the effect the art of Ajanta had
had on her. These unforgettable cave paintings seeped into her
sensibility in a way modern European art never did. But interwoven with
her practical reasoning in the letter—she must go to India for the sake
of her growth as an artist—is her devil-may-care attitude, roundly
dismissive of her father’s apprehension of losing face because of the
projected move back to India.
Strangely, this fieriness does not come across as a
defining character of her art. On the contrary, Sher-Gil’s work is
marked by an aura of coolness, even when it most wants to lose itself in
“a medley of hot colours”, to use her words. The relationship between
her life and art was far more complicated than what a simple
biographical reading of her career would allow.
The Self in Making: Amrita Sher-Gil is on till 30 November, 10.30am-6.30pm (Mondays closed), at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 145, DLF The South Court mall, Saket.
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