Kids Corner

Above: "Father and Daughter", from a "re-take" by Vivan Sundaram. Below, first from bottom - detail from Amrita Shergil's "Woman on Charpai". Second from bottom - detail from "Hill Women". Third from bottom - detail from "Three Sisters".

Art

The Genius of Amrita Shergil

by SALIL TRIPATHI

At a New Delhi auction not too long ago, a 1938 painting by Amrita Shergil called "Village Scene" was sold for about $1.6 million, the highest price ever paid for a work by an Indian artist.

There are barely 200 paintings by Shergil around today -  she died at age 28 in 1941  -  and the price not only complimented her artistry but also reflected the rarity of her works on the market. (Most are in Indian museum collections.)

A thoughtfully developed retrospective at London's Tate Modern last year helped the viewer understand why her renown is so richly deserved.

Shergil was a woman far ahead of her time.

She was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Sikh father, Sardar Umrao Singh Majithia, and a Hungarian mother, and the family moved between continents with ease. Her legendary charm enraptured many  -  including, it is believed, India's future prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Her letters, published by her nephew, the artist Vivan Sundaram, reveal a woman witty, articulate, sharp, acerbic and, at times, cruelly dismissive of entire traditions.

At age 21, she warned in a letter: "You will think I am self-opinionated, but I will stick to my intolerant ideas and to my convictions".

In 1921, her family moved from Budapest to Simla, the summer capital of the Raj. Noticing her flair for art, her family sent her in 1929, at age 16, to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where at the Salon she was to win a prize in 1933. Her luscious nudes and striking portraits vividly captured the bohemian life around her. A painting of her sister Indu and a Parisian friend is as vibrant as Renoir's circus girls.

She drew inspiration from Cezanne, Brueghel and Gaugin.

Yet, despite that inspiration, she felt little compulsion to confine herself to strictly European idioms. Her art would be identifiably
Indian. Turning 20, she dramatically declared that Europe had its masters but, for her, India mattered.

"I can't control my appetite for color", she said.

She returned home, traveling widely, refining her style, and allowing her paintings to talk in the language of Indian miniatures. Her canvases took earthier, flat tones.

Her pictures aren't "pretty"; sadness is the dominant theme. She captured India like nobody had done before, focusing on the pathos of the poor Indian, narrating his, or more often her, quotidian helplessness, reinforcing her stoic character.

In one of her letters, she wrote that she liked to focus "principally [on] the sad aspects of Indian life ... It may be that the sadness ... corresponds to something in me, some inner trail in my nature, rather than to manifestations of life which are exuberantly happy or placidly contented.".

Novelist Salman Rushdie, who modeled the fiery and flamboyant painter Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor's Last Sigh after Shergil, writes in his introduction to Sundaram's volume: "[Hers] is an art which moves naturally towards the melancholy and tragic, while keeping its eye fixed firmly on high ideals of beauty".

Shergil opened a trajectory to which almost all post-colonial Indian artists are heirs.

Bombay-based poet, critic and art curator Ranjit Hoskote points out that she changed Indian art in three key ways.

She showed that Indian artists could act inter-culturally, culling elements from world traditions, rather than being boxed in as "Indian" by the colonial observer, and that they could develop their own sense of modernity, in defiance of the norms legislated in colonial circles.

And alongside Rabindranath Tagore, she embodied the kind of cultural freedom that allowed the Indian artist to sidestep colonial dogma and nationalist counter-dogma.

The Tate exhibit vividly captured these traits, while bringing the works together in a way that imbued them with inner narrative.

A nude image of her sister, lying on a couch, her long hair undone and a shawl lying alongside, from which the image of a dragon appears, as if an extension of her hair. Another nude, an emaciated model, her back stooped, her breasts sagging, her skin pale and featureless.

The arresting image of two girls, not yet women; one pink, the other brown, one standing, one seated, implying not only the artist's own divided self but also, possibly, colonial relationships, and perhaps even sexual ambiguity.

The famous painting of the child bride  -  her quiet desperation, her hand listlessly holding a toy, perhaps implying how disposable, like that toy, she has become for her family, marrying her off before she can discover the meaning of womanhood.

Many of her women are pensive, lost in private thoughts, with desolate eyes. While Shergil found the rigid social structures revolting (indeed, she defied them in her life) she found an aesthetic in that poverty.

In Mr. Rushdie's novel, Zogoiby's son laments: "Even now, in the memory, she dazzles ... we may perceive her indirectly, in her effect on others ... ". 

A walk amongst her works today reminds us how Amrita Shergil continues to inspire.

March 18, 2008

 

[Courtesy: The Wall Street Journal]

 

 

Conversation about this article

Comment on "The Genius of Amrita Shergil"









To help us distinguish between comments submitted by individuals and those automatically entered by software robots, please complete the following.

Please note: your email address will not be shown on the site, this is for contact and follow-up purposes only. All information will be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Sikhchic reserves the right to edit or remove content at any time.