Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941): The Indian Frida Kahlo by Kathryn Hughes. London Telegraph.

The daughter of a Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian opera singer was never going to be ordinary. But Amrita Sher-Gil – in her art, in her adventuress life, and in the photographs taken of her by her pioneering father in the early 1900s – proved truly remarkable. 

Amrita with her sister Indira (left), circa 1923

The woman’s body is luscious but self-contained, suggesting that this is not an erotic pose, not quite. She is naked from the waist up, her heavy breasts seeming to offer an invitation, yet her thoughtful glance, staring out beyond the picture, suggests that she has other things on her mind.

The painting, titled Self-Portrait as Tahitian, poses a question. If the artist isn’t Tahitian, nor, as her dark skin and full lips suggest, European, what are her origins?

In fact, this painting is the work of the important, but now little-known, 20th-century Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil, whose brief and brilliant career ended with her tragic death at the age of 28. Sixty years before Tracey Emin, Sher-Gil scandalised audiences around the world by putting women’s bodies – her own, her friends’ and those of ordinary Indians – at the centre of her extraordinary art.

^{Amrita Sher-Gil in Self-Portrait as Tahitian. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}

By the time she died in 1941 her paintings were only beginning to become popular in India and in Europe. ‘I hate cheap emotional appeal,’ she declared as she went about challenging the clichés of the ‘exotic East’ – bejewelled figures posing in splendour with an elephant somewhere in the mix – with her truthful painting, full of the heat and dust of 20th-century India as it emerged from a century of British rule.
Often referred to as ‘the Indian Frida Kahlo’ because of the revolutionary way she blended the outlines of modern European painting with ‘primitive’ forms, Amrita led a life as compelling and unorthodox as her art.
What makes her story even more fascinating is that her early years were recorded for posterity by her father, a photographer – and offer insights into both Amrita herself and European and Indian high society in the 1920s.
Born on the eve of the First World War, Amrita Sher-Gil grew up in Budapest. Her parents were Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Hungarian opera singer, and Umrao Sher-Gil, a Sikh aristocrat with a deep scholarly interest in Sanskrit and astronomy.
The pair first met in 1912, while Marie Antoinette was touring Lahore, and the following year moved to her home city, where they were forced to remain until the end of the war.
The Sher-Gil family lived an unconventional life – one filled with grand political connections and glittering diplomacy, as well as intellectual enquiry and artistic endeavour. With so many people displaced during the war, the Sher-Gils were less conspicuous in Budapest than they might otherwise have been.
None the less, Umrao, who was an early adopter of camera technology, became fascinated by the way he could use home photography to document the unusual circumstances of his family. One of the earliest pictures of Amrita was taken in 1913 and shows Marie Antoinette sitting up in bed proudly, an extravagant bow in her hair and her baby swaddled in a froth of broderie anglaise. To one side of this deeply conventional tableau sits the proud father, neatly dressed in a conservative Western suit, incongruously topped with a turban.


^{Amrita as a baby with her parents, 1913. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.} 
 
When Amrita was eight the Sher-Gils were finally able to return to the family estate at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas. In this airy corner of the Punjab, the ruling British mingled with the Indian upper classes, and Umrao’s photographs are a blur of white dresses, nannies, piano practice, garden romps and Christmas trees.
In some images, Amrita and her sister Indira, in their white frocks, would not have looked out of place in Kensington. In others, they are swaddled in the rich fabrics and jewels that make them look like diminutive Indian princesses. All the photographs portray an idyllic, privileged lifestyle that is a world away from the India Amrita would go on to paint in later life.
In 1929, at the age of 16, she moved to Paris to study art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. There, Amrita – who had always displayed a rebellious streak (as a child she was expelled from her convent school for declaring herself an atheist) – plunged into everything that bohemian Paris had to offer.
The photographs taken by her father during his visits show her experimenting with her identity, sometimes wearing Western fashion and on other occasions opting for a sari. Others reveal a burgeoning sexuality, and it was in Paris that Amrita embarked on a lifelong pattern of sexual adventuring, conducting affairs with both men and women.
She could do so, according to one of her many lovers, because ‘she had that hard core of the artist that keeps itself aloof and untouched’. This, though, was about much more than disposable sex.


^{Amrita in Paris, circa 1930. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}
 
Amrita’s intense physicality fed directly into her way of making art. ‘How can one feel the beauty of a form, the intensity or the subtlety of a colour, the quality of a line,’ she asked rhetorically, ‘unless sne is a sensualist of the eyes?’ Amrita’s early paintings from this Paris period show every sign of having been made in the Western tradition.
She had long been interested in Gauguin, whose influence was so evident in her Self-Portrait as Tahitian. But Modigliani, Cézanne and Renoir all became important, too.
In Young Girls (1932) Amrita’s sister Indira sits on the left dressed in fashionable European clothing, while the partially undressed figure in the foreground is a French friend. The two women, one poised and assured, the other more awkward with her face hidden beneath her messy hair, have been described as embodying different sides of Amrita herself.
Astounding in its technical competence – the critics were especially impressed by the way the young artist was able to convey so many tonal variations of the colour white – the picture was awarded a gold medal at the Grand Salon of 1933.
Despite this prestigious recognition, Amrita found herself increasingly longing for India, convinced that it held the key to her future career. Never one for false modesty, she declared, ‘Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.’
Indian art traditionally tended to the sketchy and sentimental, but Amrita was determined to find a new way of showing the reality of the country that her father had taught her to love. ‘There are such wonderful, such glorious things in India, so many unexploited pictorial possibilities, that it is a pity that so few of us have ever attempted to look for them even (much less interpret them),’ she explained.


^{Three Girls, 1935. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}
 
A painting from 1935 illustrates this profound shift in sensibility. Three Girls shows three young Indian women sitting passively as if waiting for their future to appear. Unlike the resolutely urban figures in Young Girls, these are clearly rural women, dressed in brightly coloured saris. The mood, though, is far from joyful: the shadows on the wall suggest that the girls’ anticipated lives – complete with husbands and families – may not bring the happiness that their culture has taught them to expect.
It was not, though, until late 1937 that Amrita finally found the subject and the style that would come to define her art. Late in the year she embarked upon a three-month journey through the rural south, determined to investigate an India that could not have been more different from the colonial tea-party atmosphere of Simla.
As she travelled deeper into the dense perpetual sunlight, the colours became brighter while the bodies turned dark. Now was her chance to fill her canvases with farm workers, camel drivers and nurses. Steering clear of sentimentality, she developed a style that drew its inspiration as much from the bold shapes of European modernism as the rich cultures of mogul miniatures and the cave paintings of Ajanta.
The Wedding Party is a signature work from this time, capturing the isolated lives of women whose inner worlds seethe with boredom, resignation and frustrated desire. The painting shows a young bride surrounded by female relatives as she prepares for marriage, her pale attenuated body contrasting strongly with the rounded fecundity of the figure to the right.
The palette of ochres and ambers gives a reassuring earthy stability to this little scene. And yet, as always with any work by Amrita, ambiguity is never far away. Is the mood sacrificial or celebratory? Is this the end of life or its beginning? The blank, impassive faces of the women refuse to provide any easy answers.


^{The Wedding Party was painted during Amrita’s travels through the south of India. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}
 
Returning to India may have revolutionised Amrita’s art, but it did not interrupt her sexual experimentation and by her mid-twenties her exploits had become so well known that Marie Antoinette and Umrao, liberal though they were, took the decision to burn many of her intimate letters for fear of them getting into the wrong hands.
When Amrita, at the age of 25, declared her intention to marry, the announcement surprised everyone. But her mother’s joy was short-lived, for Amrita chose as her husband an impoverished cousin from the Hungarian side of her family. Victor Egan was a doctor who had enjoyed a special bond with Amrita since childhood.
He had managed to obtain abortions for her on at least two occasions, which perhaps gave Amrita the sense that he would always look after her. Sadly, though, there were limits even to Victor’s protective powers. In the closing days of 1941 Amrita haemorrhaged and died.
According to her most recent biographer, this was caused by yet another abortion gone wrong. Still only 28 at the time of her death, Amrita Sher-Gil left behind her a body of work that would become crucial to India’s growing sense of itself in the decades following independence. Neither sentimental nor bleak, her bold, vivid paintings of ordinary people, especially women, are now considered classics of both European and world art. But her significance goes further than this.
By figuring so centrally in her father’s photographic art, Amrita Sher-Gil helped forge a record of a hybrid culture, one that was nourished by both East and West yet managed to transcend both.