Amrita Sher-Gil, 1913-1941

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, then in the Kingdom of Hungary. Her father was an Indian Punjabi Sikh aristocrat scholar, and her mother was a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer.

In 1921, when she was eight, the family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, India. From a young age, Sher-Gil showed talent in painting but started her formal training only when arriving in India. She also learned piano and violin, and within a year of their arrival, she played in concerts at Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre.

In 1924, at 11, she moved with her mother to Italy for a year, where she attended an art school in Florence and found inspiration in the works of the great Italian masters. At 16, she returned to Europe to get training as a painter in Paris. First, she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later at the École des Beaux-Arts.

At the time, she drew inspiration from Western art, especially the post-impressionism style, and included self-portraits, portraits of friends and classmates, still life, nudes, and Parisian life. At 19, she had her breakthrough with her painting Young Girls, for which she was awarded a gold medal and gained membership at the Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris, the youngest ever and the only Asian to become a member.

In 1934, longings drew her back to India, and three years later, she embarked on a tour to South India to discover and explore her Indian roots. Inspired by the people and the scenery, especially the wall paintings of the Ajanta Caves, Sher-Gil began to incorporate her Western techniques with the Indian aesthetic. This new innovative style separated her from her contemporaries, particularly her use of colors, contrasting the pale tones of Bengal art.

By then, Sher-Gil claimed to have found her ‘artistic mission,’ which was expressing the life of the Indian people through the canvas, as can be seen in her South Indian trilogy – Brahmacharis, Bride’s Toilet, and South Indian Villagers Going to Market.

At 25, she married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Viktor Egan, and they settled near her paternal family in Saraya, in what is today Uttar Pradesh. There, she focused on rural life and began experimenting with the 17th-century Mughal miniatures painting style, as seen in her works In the Ladies, Village Scene, and Siesta.

In 1941, Sher-Gil and her husband moved to Lahore, where she worked on her first major solo exhibition. She became ill only a few days before the show’s opening and slipped into a comma. She died a few days later, at the age of 28.

Sher-Gil’s artistic style has influenced generations of Indian artists, and she is considered one of the significant avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century.

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