One of India’s most significant female artists ever

‘Amrita Sher-Gil: A self-portrait in letters & writings’ (Publisher: Tulika Books) offers some interesting insights into her extraordinary life spread across India, Italy, Hungary, France and the UK. Her correspondence, carrying notes and annotations by established artist-curator and her nephew, Vivan Sundaram, portrayed her mesmerizing personality laced with a touch of history.

Obviously, she was passionate in her commitment to artistic ideals and absolute in terms of her quest for the Indian idiom. Sample her views on art processes and philosophy in a letter she wrote to one of her critic friends. “Ironically enough, good art never appeals at first sight. In fact, I will go so far as to say that more often than not it repels. Bad Art, on the other hand, based as it is on cheap effect, appeals immediately to the artistically underdeveloped mind and therein lies its danger.

“Because though taste, of course, like every other faculty, can be developed, and when trained in the proper direction should qualify everyone to distinguish a bad work of art from a good one and enable people to develop a genuine preference for the latter, it is unfortunately very seldom that people attempt to develop this faculty even to a moderate degree,” she notes.

“There are people who have the illusion that there are no absolute values in Art and believe, therefore, that personal taste is the only standard by which a work can be judged, and consequently dub everything that repels them as bad with the certitude and intolerance that can only be the outcome of ignorance...”

Her works and life history were presented at Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2006-07. Lauding her achievements, an accompanying note stated: “The Indian-Hungarian artist, an emblematic figure only comparable to frida kahlo, was a true protagonist of artistic modernism in India. Her work was a culmination of several different things like (Indian) cult and exotism, politics and sexuality as well as a curious mixture of contrasting visual cultures.