Painters [*/ ) A pioneer in modern Indian art | Amrita Sher-Gil (1913 – 1941)
Amrita Sher-Gil (1913 –1941) was an eminent Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called
“one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century” and a “pioneer” in
modern Indian art. Drawn to painting at a young age, Sher-Gil started getting formal lessons
in the art, at the age of eight. Sher-Gil first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her oil
painting entitled Young Girls (1932)
Sher-Gil traveled throughout her life to countries including Turkey, France, and India,
deriving heavily from their art styles and cultures. Sher-Gil is considered an important
woman painter of 20th-century India, whose legacy stands on a level with that of the
pioneers of Bengal Renaissance. She was also an avid reader and a pianist. Sher-Gil’s
paintings are among the most expensive by Indian women painters today, although
few acknowledged her work when she was alive.
The daughter of a Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian opera singer, painter Amrita Sher-Gil grew up
in an unconventional household given the time and place in history. While she was born in
Budapest, Hungary in 1913, Amrita moved back and forth between India and Europe as a
young girl, studying art and taking up painting along the way. At age 16, she moved to Paris
and settled down for a moment to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While classes proved to
be more formal than she was used to, her rebellious nature led her to explore all that
bohemian Paris had to offer. During these years, she openly explored her sexuality,
having relationships with both men and women. She also experimented with her personal
style, wearing typical 1920s Western fashions one day and traditional Indian saris the next.
this rich formative period that she began to paint with oils. Her work captured the European
academic realism of France of the 1920s and 30s. She was an admirer of the French artist
Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938) and drew inspiration from her unconventional representation
of her female subjects. Valadon was known for her powerful and sometimes controversial
paintings, often of female nudes and self-portraits, and rose to the peak of her fame in the
1920s in Paris just as Sher-Gil was exploring the Parisian art scene and finding her own style.
Valadon transformed the genre of the female nude by providing an insightful expression of
women’s experiences, which seemed just the right language for Sher-Gil in her formative
adult life as an artist.
in Mexico. They are both considered among the greatest avant-garde women artists practicing in
the early 20th century. The parallel artistic careers and personal lives of Sher-Gil and Kahlo are
uncanny. Each of them obsessively painted self-portraits with an intensity that is almost hypnotic,
drawing the viewer into the innermost psyche of the artist, where one discovers a sea of melancholy
and tragic poetry. (…)
Self-Portrait, France, 1928 Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1931
Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled, 1923
(when she was 10 years old)
