1. Amrita Sher-Gil has been called "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century" and a pioneer in modern Indian art.
48 Facts About Amrita Sher-Gil
1. 2.
Amrita Sher-Gil first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her 1932 oil painting Young Girls.
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Amrita Sher-Gil depicted everyday life of the people in her paintings.
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Amrita Sher-Gil traveled throughout her life to various countries including Turkey, France, and India, deriving heavily from precolonial Indian art styles as well as contemporary culture.
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Amrita Sher-Gil is considered an important painter of 20th-century India, whose legacy stands on a level with that of the pioneers from the Bengal Renaissance.
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Amrita Sher-Gil's paintings are among the most expensive by Indian women painters today, although few acknowledged her work when she was alive.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was born Dalma-Amrita on 30 January 1913, at 4 Szilagyi Dezso square, Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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Amrita Sher-Gil's father was Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, an Indian Jat Sikh aristocrat from the Majithia family and a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and her mother was Marie Antoinette Gottesman, a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer who came from an affluent bourgeois family.
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Amrita Sher-Gil's mother came to India as a companion of Princess Bamba Sutherland, the granddaughter of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters; her younger sister was Indira Sundaram, mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram.
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Baktay noticed Amrita Sher-Gil's artistic talents during his visit to Shimla in 1926 and was an advocate of Amrita Sher-Gil pursuing art.
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Amrita Sher-Gil guided her by critiquing her work and gave her an academic foundation to grow on.
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In 1921, her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, India, and Amrita Sher-Gil soon began learning piano and violin.
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Amrita Sher-Gil received formal lessons in art from Major Whitmarsh, who was later replaced by Hal Bevan-Petman.
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In 1924, when he returned to Italy, she too moved there, along with Amrita Sher-Gil, and got her enrolled at Santa Annunziata, an art school in Florence.
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At sixteen, Amrita Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter in Paris, first at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere under Pierre Vaillent and Lucien Simon and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
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Amrita Sher-Gil drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin and Amedeo Modigliani, while working under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and through the company of artist friends and lovers like Taslitzky.
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In 1931, Amrita Sher-Gil was briefly engaged to Yusuf Ali Khan, but rumours spread that she was having an affair with her first cousin and later husband Viktor Egan.
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Amrita Sher-Gil practiced a lot in the Bohemian circles of Paris in the early 1930s.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was the youngest ever member, and the only Asian to have received this recognition.
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When she was in Paris, one of her professors said that judging by the richness of her colouring Amrita Sher-Gil was not in her element in the west, and that her artistic personality would find its true atmosphere in the east.
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In 1933, Amrita Sher-Gil "began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India feeling in some strange way that there lay her destiny as a painter".
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Amrita Sher-Gil returned to India at the end of 1934.
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In May 1935, Amrita Sher-Gil met the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then working as assistant editor and leader writer for The Calcutta Statesman.
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Amrita Sher-Gil left herself for travel in 1936 at the behest of art collector and critic Karl Khandalavala, who encouraged her to pursue her passion for discovering her Indian roots.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and the cave paintings at Ajanta.
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Later in 1937, Amrita Sher-Gil toured South India and produced her South Indian trilogy of paintings Bride's Toilet, Brahmacharis, and South Indian Villagers Going to Market following her visit to the Ajanta Caves, when she made a conscious attempt to return to classical Indian art.
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Amrita Sher-Gil married her Hungarian first cousin, Viktor Egan when she was 25.
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Amrita Sher-Gil had helped Sher-Gil obtain abortions on at least two occasions prior to their marriage.
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Amrita Sher-Gil moved with him to India to stay at her paternal family's home in Saraya, Sardar nagar, Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh.
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Amrita Sher-Gil's art was strongly influenced by the paintings of the two Tagores, Rabindranath and Abanindranath who were pioneers of the Bengal School of painting.
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Amrita Sher-Gil travelled across India with her paintings but the Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad returned them and the Maharaja of Mysore chose Raja Ravi Varma's paintings over hers.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was attracted to the poor, distressed and the deprived and her paintings of Indian villagers and women are a meditative reflection of their condition.
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Amrita Sher-Gil's paintings were at one stage even considered for use in the Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.
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Amrita Sher-Gil exchanged letters with Nehru for a time, but those letters were burned by her parents when she was away getting married in Budapest.
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In September 1941, Egan and Amrita Sher-Gil moved to Lahore, then in undivided India and a major cultural and artistic centre.
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Amrita Sher-Gil lived and painted at 23 Ganga Ram Mansions, The Mall, Lahore where her studio was on the top floor of the townhouse she inhabited.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was known for her many affairs with both men and women, and she painted many of the latter.
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In 1941, at age 28, just days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore, Amrita Sher-Gil became seriously ill and slipped into a coma.
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Amrita Sher-Gil later died around midnight on 5 December 1941, leaving behind a large volume of work.
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Amrita Sher-Gil's mother accused her doctor husband Egan of having murdered her.
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Amrita Sher-Gil's art has influenced generations of Indian artists from Sayed Haider Raza to Arpita Singh and her depiction of the plight of women has made her art a beacon for women at large both in India and abroad.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was able to prove to western societies that Indians were able to make fine art.
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Amrita Sher-Gil is a documentary film about the artist, directed by Bhagwan Das Garga and produced by the Government of India's Films Division.
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Amrita Sher-Gil was sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo because of the "revolutionary" way she blended Western and traditional art forms.
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The 1932 portrait features Denyse Proutaux, a Parisian art critic, whom Amrita Sher-Gil met in 1931.
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Proutaux was featured in other Sher-Gil paintings, including Young Girls and Denise Proutaux, which were both included in the exhibition "Amrita Shergil: The Passionate Quest" at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
48.
On 18 September 2023, Amrita Sher-Gil's 1937 painting The Story Teller fetched $7.4 million at a recent auction, setting a record for the highest price achieved by an Indian artist.