Amrita
Sher-Gil: a life in art
YASHODHARA DALMIA
Amrita
Sher-GilÕs work changed the face of modern art and paved the course it was to
take in the country. She was able to bring her western training to the existing
traditions of Indian art and melded them together to express contemporary
reality.
Amrita was born of a Sikh
father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil and a Hungarian mother
Marie Antoinette who met in Lahore. Umrao Singh
belonged to a well known family which lived in Majithia
near Amritsar and being of a serious bent of mind, spent his time studying
Sanskrit, Persian and Urdu texts. While Umrao was in
London, he met Ranjit SinghÕs granddaughter, Princess Bamba, and become quite
friendly with her. She, in her turn, was attracted to the handsome, young Sikh
aristocrat but when they met again in Lahore he fell under the spell of her
talented travelling companion, Marie Antoinette. Umrao
SinghÕs attention was caught at a soirŽe, when the attractive young woman with
flaming-red hair sang while playing the piano. They were married in Lahore
according to Sikh rites on 4 February 1912 and shortly after that set sail for
Budapest to spend some time with her family.
Amrita was born on a cold
January morning on the Buda side of river Danube in a turn-of-the-century seven
story building with painted tiles and a central courtyard where from the
windows they could see the church across the street. Today, the house bears a
plaque which announces that the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, of Indo-Hungarian
origin, was born there on 30 January 1913.
The outbreak of the war
made the family stay on in Hungary and soon, as supplies from India stopped,
they moved to the family house in the countryside. The family set sail for
India on 2 January 1921 after spending ten years in Hungary. They stayed in
their new home in Shimla, which was to be called ÔThe HolmeÕ.
Even at this early stage, Amrita would spend her time sketching but it was the
visit of her uncle, Ervin Baktay which was a turning
point, for on seeing her talent he persuaded her parents to send her to Paris
for training.
The journey of one of the
most significant artists in India can be traced from her training in Paris to
its triumphant culmination back in the country. When Amrita left India for
Paris in 1929, she was only sixteen. She studied for some months at the Grand Chaumiere and was then admitted to the Ecole des Beaux
Arts, the primary art institute in Paris at the time. Here, she went through
the drill, from studio portraits to nudes to landscapes.
The painting Two Girls (1932) made in this
period had the erect, almost puritanical figure of a woman shown frontally,
posed by her sister Indira, in conversation with a slouched blonde, Rubenesque
form for which the model was her friend Denise Proutaux.
Made in contrasting colours and in opposition to each
other, the two women brought together binaries which connected diverse cultural
and social traditions. This painting won her the Gold Medal at the Grand Salon
in 1933, and she became an associate of the Salon which was quite an honour for a young student from Asia.
It was primarily the human
figure that was AmritaÕs preoccupation, and during this period she made
hundreds of studies with careful attention to anatomy and posture. In testing
the veracity of the form, she seemed to imbibe its essential value, thus making
her work distinctive even at this early stage. It becomes clear that for Amrita
it was of paramount importance that the subject reveal himself in his full
state of being and this is indeed the case with her successful works like Portrait
of a Young Man (1930) made of her colleague Boris Taslitzky.
The 92-year-old artist
remembered her vividly when we visited him in his Place DÕItalee
studio in Paris in January 2003. As he stated, ÔI met her in 1930 at the Beaux
Arts where I was a student. When she entered there was an enormous silence,
because she had a great presence. I was nineteen and perhaps she was seventeen.
I was surprised at how well she painted even at that age. I fell in love with
her.Õ
In her self-portraits such
as the one made in 1930, there is a reflection of the Tahitian in all her
abandon, as it was also revealed in a nude portrait of herself.
These early signs of wanting to be a part of the ÔotherÕ were visible in different ways in her
work of this period where Gaugin became the signpost to move towards a
sensuous, darker hued, a non-western figure.
It was primarily for the sake of her artistic
development that Amrita decided to abandon her fairly active cafŽ and night
life in Paris and return to an India she felt she was destined for. She felt
she was returning to a country whose riches she had been exposed to in Paris.
As she stated in a letter to her mother from Budapest dated September 1934,
ÔOur long stay in Europe has aided me to discover, as it were, India. Modern
art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and
sculpture. It seems paradoxical, but I know for certain, that had we not come
away to Europe, I should perhaps never have realized that a fresco from Ajanta
or a small piece of sculpture in the Musee Guimet is worth more than the whole of Renaissance! In
short, now I wish to go back to appreciate India and its worth.Õ
She reached the country in
December 1934, and did not immediately join her parents in Shimla, but stayed
for a while in her ancestral home in Amritsar, Punjab. One of her first acts
was to take to wearing the sari, which she did for the rest of her life. It was
also a symbolic act, since this is the period when Amrita began to develop a
new aesthetic language following her gradual exposure to the art of Ajanta and
Ellora, and Pahari, Rajput and Mughal miniatures.
While still in Amritsar, she made the painting Group
of Three Girls (1935) which depicts young women in unsettling reds and
greens. The overview imposed on their bearing brings about a heightened
awareness of their existence where their flamboyant costume contrasts sharply
with their melancholic expressions and reflects the state of their existence.
Even though grouped together,
each one appears isolated and self-enclosed. This sense of being alone in a
crowd was to be a characteristic of AmritaÕs work during her stay in India.
Back in the lofty
surroundings of Shimla, ensconced within the family home where she had a
studio, the beauty and desolation of the hilly landscape struck her. As she
wrote, ÔIt was the vision of a winter in India – desolate, yet strangely
beautiful – on endless tracks of luminous yellow-grey land, of
dark-bodied, sad faced, incredibly thin men and women who move silently,
looking almost like silhouettes, and over which an indefinable melancholy
reigns. It was different from the India, voluptuous, colourful,
sunny and superficial, the India so false to the tempting travel posters that I
had expected to see.Õ
In winter that year, Amrita
made two of her important paintings, Hill Women and Hill Men (1935). The
melancholy faces and thin bodies of the poor folk are transmuted to figures
bearing an unutterable grace and dignity. The very dignity and grace of their
bearing evokes a sympathetic chord in the viewer and a heightened awareness of
their condition.
Amrita was feted and fawned
over in Shimla which was the summer capital of the British as well as by
royalty and the upper classes. But in the evening, she would return to her
studio put on her smock and set to work. As she said: ÔMy studio is quite bare,
a huge room with whitewashed walls, and only a couple of Chinese paintings and
the work of my friend (Marie Louise Chasseny) of whom
I have spoken to youÉto adorn it. In addition to your the Javanese cloth
painting over the fireplace, a bookshelf, a divan and a couple of armchairs to
loll about in. I in my smock of blue cloth (the stuff that engine drivers wear)
with my hair severely brushed back (when it is brushed, which is seldom) donÕt
present that delectably neat appearance you have in your short course of our
acquaintance come to associate me withÉÕ
She wrote this in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru in
November 1937. She was quite close to him, and it is speculated that she was
even intimately involved with him.
It was in Shimla that
Amrita met Malcolm Muggeridge, the acerbic correspondent of The Statesman,
whose critical writings made him unpopular with his editor and indeed the
Viceroy, Lord Willingdon. She had a raging affair with him: ÔShe is very
sensual and made-up, was wearing an exquisite silver and black sari, is rather
self-consciously arty; has studied art in Paris; paints.Õ (Like It Was: The
Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, Collins, London, 1981).
The attraction of two
people, at odds with the establishment, to each other was inevitable and Amrita
was to paint him in the same critical manner. We see a strong, somewhat edgy
person with a disproportionately large, outstretched hand. The mobile, shifting
attractive face creates an unsettling effect of strangeness precisely because
it defies pre-conceived notions. Malcolm left Shimla soon after in September
1935 for a job with the Evening Standard, in London, but was to write
profusely about her in his books in an intense but ironic manner.
In his book Chronicles of Wasted Time (Volume 2,
The Infernal Grove, Collins, London, 1973) he writes ÔAmrita had her
studio there, and I sat for her; or rather lolled on a sofa, sometimes reading,
or just watching with fascination the animal intensity of her concentration,
making her short of breath, with beads of sweat appearingÉ on her upper lip. It
was this animality which she somehow transferred to the colours
as she mixed them and splashed them on her canvas.Õ
Amrita was to step outside
the sheltered realms of her existence, when she decided to make a trip to the
South. On her way she stopped in Bombay where she was captivated by the
miniatures in the collection of the art historian Karl Khandalavala,
who was to become a close friend. The works that came out of her southern trip
were to mark a watershed in her oeuvre. She was spellbound by the cave
paintings and sculptures at Ajanta and Ellora (5th to 8th centuries). The
sonorous rhythms of Ajanta, undulating figures that seemed to rise from the
deeply hewn caves, and the subtle and brilliant hues, sent her reeling on a
sensuous journey. She attempted to translate into her paintings the plasticity,
the colour juxtapositioning,
and the classical poise of the forms.
The moulded
rhythms of Ajanta begin to be assimilated in a painting like The BrideÕs
Toilet (1937) made on her return to Shimla. The subject has been
devised by the courtly miniature traditions that were often used to enhance
eroticism, with the woman adorning herself also being observed by the lover
hiding, say behind a bush. In AmritaÕs painting, however, the fair-skinned and
obviously upper caste woman turns towards the viewer to reveal her desolation.
Her hennaed hands, suggesting fertility, only serve to contrast with her
distress. The earlier immobility gives way to the rhythmic gestures of ritual
activity.
Amrita is moving towards surer ground with the next
painting, Brahmacharis (1937), where a
group of young Brahmin boys, wearing their sacred thread and white dhotis
create a composition of both nobility and vulnerability. The confident handling
of the figures and the juxtaposition of dark and light masses create an
exceptional work of male beauty. The modulation of white against subtly nuanced
amber red makes it a stunning exposition of colour.
The cavernous deep background mimics the caves, providing the layered format
for the rhythmic stances of the figures. It is a painting that could have been
seen in the flickering light of the flame, as in the caves, where the even
tonalities of the composition could reveal submerged forms. The Brahmacharis is indeed a masterpiece, perfectly poised
between the serenity of ritual tradition and the turbulence of diversity.
In monumentalizing the
every-day, the ordinary, Amrita reached her apogee with the South Indian
Villagers Going to the Market (1937) where for the first time we have a
suggestion of undulating body movement in time. With their burnt sienna
bodies and their brilliant clothes, the figures appear to have stepped down
from the Ajanta cave walls to go about their everyday affairs.
An intriguing duality
existed in AmritaÕs methods, where she depended heavily on the academic-realist
method of having models pose for her while aspiring towards modernism. This
went to absurd lengths, where she had a Sikh boy pose as a South Indian brahmachari, or a Pahari servant woman dress in bright
clothes to be a part of the tableau of BrideÕs Toilet. Yet she was
moving increasingly towards simplification.
In June 1938 Amrita returned to Hungary to marry her
first cousin Victor Egan despite the disapproval of her parents. During this
period, she made a marvellous composition – Two
Girls (1939) where extreme simplicity of form is modulated by tones of
white and brown. Yet it is a complex work at the level of painterly and
psychological intentions. The young women are startling in their bold
frontality, but secretive at the same time. The physical and emotional longing
for the women for one another has many connotations – personal, social
and racial. It is also the embodiment of two aspects of AmritaÕs own
personality – the western and the eastern. It is a painting overloaded
with significance.
In many ways Amrita was in
a position of being an insider and an outsider. She was able to catch the quick
of her subjectÕs personality, while retaining a distance. Intuitively aware of
the deeply sensuous rhythms of womenÕs lives, she also empathised
with the frustrations of their truncated selves. In a painting like The
Bride (1940) for instance, the depiction is of a woman dressed in
resplendent clothes that contrast with her expression of deep foreboding.
After her marriage in
Budapest, Amrita returned to India and spent a considerable period at the
family estate in Saraya in Uttar Pradesh where her
doctor husband ran a clinic. She had an opportunity to watch village women go
about their daily routine and to apprehend the rhythms of their lives. She was
also able to observe womenÕs enuii and longing within
the four walls of their cloistered existence, their feudal seclusion and the
pastimes they devised to while away the hours.
In Woman Resting on a
Charpoy (1940) she reflects the sequestered feminine world which was her
domain and became the rich ground to represent the female body that was layered
with meaning. The plunging view of the woman lying on a bed, one hand thrown
back, her legs in a position of abandon expresses all the lassitude of her
existence which contrasts with her bright clothes. The red suffuses and
suffocates the image in both eroticized expectation and truncated desire. While
the figure is often transfixed in the moment the vibrant colours
are in constant movement.
The captivating duality of inertia and sensuality touch
upon the essential aspects of womenÕs lives in India. The delineation of the
female presence was to reach a dual complexity – the simplicity of form
would enshroud a metaphorical and psychological richness. In The Swing
(1940) the thighs of the young girl are wedged between the seat the bare foot
resting on the wooden clog protruding below and the red of her clothes is
picked up by the blossoms in the trees behind her as she mounts the swing. The
playful act of swinging is heightened by its eroticization and the frustration
of the woman evident in her body language.
Amrita now wanted to engage
with a wider canvas which could reflect life as it is lived by ordinary people
particularly women in India. Her involvement with the structure of the painting
drew her increasingly towards the miniature tradition and to the denotation of
figures as a minute component of a wider scheme of things. In Village Scene (1938),
a woman sorting leaves along with her fellow workers with the soft light
falling on her form is a subject of exquisite grace.
A vivacious description of womenÕs activities forms a rhythmic
pattern over the canvas in Village Scene. Influenced by Pahari miniatures, we
see the women engage in their daily chores and there is a swaying hum from one
side to another. Their faces are in darkness, but their body language clearly
marks them
out as individuals, separate and distinctive. In Village Scene, Amrita uses
white nuanced in different ways, to spell binding effect. The white of the
womenÕs clothes glimmers against their dark bodies, and the white walls in the
backdrop create haloes around their heads, adding a quiet drama to the
composition. An exceptional use of white always marked out AmritaÕs paintings.
She had discovered that white, if used effectively, could enliven a painting
– like a flash of lightning which would illuminate the entire space.
A whole gamut of activity taking place simultaneously gets
incorporated into a painting like In the LadiesÕ Enclosure (1938). Far
from being seductive the woman dressing herself is imbued with the grace of intimate
domestic routine. The feminine figure in her works is always laced with a sense
of sadness which had to do with the difficulties of her own life as well as the
desolation she sensed in the life of women.
A work like The Potato
Peeler (1938) for instance, made in Hungary, draws upon the desolation of
peasant women once again universalized in her gaze. In this work as well as in
many others there is a residual sadness for the truncated fullness of life.
But primarily AmritaÕs fascination with the Mughal
miniatures began to emerge Ôfor their subtle, yet intense, keenness of form,
acute and detached observationÉ.Õ In the Elephant Promenade (1940) for
instance, she had the entire scene enacted with elephants and grooms against
the wall and dome of the Majithia estate at Saraya to give her what looked like a Mughal miniature. Yet
she was able to achieve the interweaving of man, animal and landscape while
drawing out their essential aspects.In her overview
of the subject, she was able to draw upon the essential aspect of their lives
while grouping them together.
Amrita had experimented
with the figure in landscape earlier, while in Hungary, and had made a
masterly, Bruegelesque painting, in which an animated market scene is
highlighted by a white church steeple at the back. The Hungarian Market (1938)
has the wizened old man at the centre of the painting, in repose and as a
counterpoint to the frenzied activity around him and is echoed by another
painting, the Ancient Story Teller (1940) later, which is an exceptional
work where the landscape is included as a thematic necessity. In doing so, she
is moving towards more rooted work, where the characteristics of the
environment are drawn in.
The white of the mansion,
soothing as well as dazzling, with its impenetrable feudal existence inside
interfaces with artisanal practices that continue to exist outside. The
venerable old man with his raised hand relates timeless tales while the woman
pounds grain in an earthen pot. The painting speaks of cyclical rhythms. In
this compressed work man, animal and nature are situated as part of a wider
scheme of thing.
By September 1941 Amrita
and Victor had reached Lahore to set up home and after much hunting they
finally rented a place near the Mall, then the fashionable part of Lahore
– at Apartment 23 in Sir Ganga Ram Mansion, also known as Exchange
Mansion, occupied mostly by professionals. Victor had his clinic on the ground
floor, the living rooms were on the first floor, and the barsati
on top was AmritaÕs studio.
The pair enthusiastically set about doing up the place
– at last a home they could call their own. Visitors caught Amrita and
Victor in dungarees, polishing the floor or painting the doors and windows.
They furnished it tastefully, hiring some tables and chairs and hanging some of
her paintings on the walls, although most were still in Shimla. Victor fitted
up his clinic with the appropriate equipment, and they even managed to acquire
a small Ford car.
Some of IndiaÕs legendary
writers, artists and intellectuals lived in Lahore in the 1930s and Õ40s, and
they began to congregate at their place. The writer Khushwant Singh held a
fortnightly soirŽe at his residence, with writers and poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ahmed Shah Bokhari, Gurbax Singh, Kartar
Singh Duggal, Amrita Pritam, Mangat Rai, G.D. Khosla and many others. Amrita
knew most of them including the legendary A.S. Bokhari,
then the director-general of All India Radio and an extremely vibrant person.
LahoreÕs artist community included Abdul Rehman Chughtai,
B.C. Sanyal, Bevan Petman, Roop
and Mary Krishna and the young Krishen Khanna and
Satish Gujral. Amrita began to enjoy life to the
hilt.
By this time Amrita had
decided to have an exhibition in December which was to be held at the Punjab
Literary League Hall, above LorangÕs cafe run by a
Swiss in the Charing Cross area. It was on 3 December, however, that she took
ill and passed away suddenly in the midnight of December 5th.The cause of her
death remains unknown but a close friend, Iqbal Singh, who later wrote a book
on her and was present in the last few hours mentions that she kept talking of colours. He quotes her husband Victor Ôshe kept mumbling
about colours – blues, reds and greens and
violets, all sorts of colours. Unconsciously or
sub-consciously, she was still thinking about colours
and light and shade. Then she went into a deep coma.Õ The exhibition was held
posthumously at the Punjab Literary League gallery on 21 December 1941.
Colours is what AmritaÕs last unfinished painting (1941) is
about. A mass of deep green foliage, facades of red and yellow buildings in the
distance indicated as colour rather than as mass
bring in a move towards abstraction. It was a view from the window of her
studio in Lahore. A woman drying cowdung cakes on the
terrace, the buffaloes perched on the road, bring in the pastoral aspects of an
urban city in India. But it was also the transportation of the feudal world she
had known into the culture of a vibrant, cosmopolitan city which was the
reality of a new emerging society. While delineating form, the leaping red at
the back is like a tongue offlame emblazoning a new
trail of imagination.
The
painting, abruptly terminated by her sudden death at the age of 28, is a marker
for an important breakthrough Amrita was about to make. But her legacy
continues to influence generations of artists making her words into a truism:
ÔEurope belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs
only to me.Õ
Footnote :
*
Yashodhara Dalmia is the author of Sayed Haider
Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist (2021) and Amrita Shergil –
A Life (2006) among other books.