Legendary Indian female artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s life journey - I

Born in 1913 in Budapest to a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother, Amrita Sher-Gil was the first significant Indian female artist to attain fame internationally. The family came to India in 1921, where did her early schooling. Her father Umrao Sher-Gil was an armature photographer who photographed himself and his family over the course of five decades.

They brought out the close relationship that father and his sensitive daughter shared. Possessing extraordinary painterly skills and talent, she received her artistic grooming in Florence, and later joined the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris where she studied from 1930 to 1934. She tried on different personae and explored her own hybrid identity.

Her early works reflected the academic style she was trained in. She simultaneously experimented to represent the non-western body in her paintings. An admirer of artist Paul Gauguin, the influence of realism was palpable in some of her works, particularly in the time period between the two world wars.

However, she also experimented with ways to represent the non-western body in paintings like ‘Sleep (1933)’ of her younger sister. She felt haunted by an intense longing for coming back to India’, as the artist herself had revealed, ‘feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter.’

In 1934 the family moved to Shimla. She painted vigorously and traveled widely, observing and represent India’s rural life. Exuding a joie de vivre, her practice was gradually characterized by a sense of melancholia, even while eyes firmly fixed on the timelessness of a pretty object. With ‘Three Girls’ (1935), she visibly switched to a flatter, more modern composition from the academic, realist style of painting. A pair of paintings (‘Hill Men’ and ‘Hill Women’) she painted in the same year, depicted Indian villagers, evoked a sense of dignity and pathos.