AMRITA SHERGILL -EMiNENT INDiAN PAiNTER

[cheeku17]

Amrita Sher-Gil (अमृता शेरगिल) (January 30, 1913 , – December 5, 1941),

Amrita Sher-Gil was an eminent Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo, and today considered an important women painter of 20th century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance ; she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India
Today, she is amongst Nine Masters, whose work was declared as art treasures by The Archaeological Survey of India, in 1976 and 1979 , and over 100 of her paintings are now displayed at National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, Hungary to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and also a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Jewish Opera singer from Hungary. Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters born. Her younger sister was Indira Sundaram , mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. She spent most of early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay.
In 1921 her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla in India .Though she was already painting since the age of five she formally started learning painting at age eight.

Amrita with her sister Indira, 1922

At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter at Paris, first at the Grande Chaumiere under Pierre Vaillant and later at École des Beaux-Arts (1930-34) , she drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, while coming under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and the company of artist friends and lovers like Boris Tazlitsky. Her early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting, especially as being practised in the Bohemian circles of Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, she made her first important work, Young Girls , which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever and the only Asian to have received this recognition hence.


In 1934, while in Europe she "began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India,".. "feeling in some strange way that there lay my destiny as a painter", as she later wrote about her return to India, in the same year . Soon she began a rediscovery of the traditions of Indian art which was to continue till her death. She stayed at their family home at Summer Hill, Shimla, for a while, before leaving for travel, in 1936, at the behest of an art collector and critic, Karl Khandalavala, who encouraged her to pursue her passion for discovering her Indian roots ; subsequently she was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and cave paintings at Ajanta Caves.

Amrita Sher-Gil in her studio in Shimla, photographed by father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, 1937.

In 1937, she toured South India and produced the famous South Indian trilogy paintings, Bride's Toilet', 'Brahmacharis' and 'The South Indian Villagers' that reveal her passionate sense of colour and an equally passionate empathy for her Indian subjects, who are often depicted in their poverty and despair, by now the transformation in her work was complete and she had found her 'artistic mission', to express the life of Indian people through her canvas, as she herself admitted .

This was distinct from European phase, in the interwar years, when her work showed an engagement with the works of Hungarian painters, especially the Nagybanya school of painting, .


Sher-Gil married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Victor Egan in 1938, and moved with him to India, to stay at her paternal family's home in Saraya, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, thus began her second phase in painting, which equals in its impact on Indian Modern Art, with likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy of Bengal school of art, as the 'Calcutta Group' of artists movement, which transformed it later, in a big way, was yet to start in 1943, and the 'Progressive Artist's Group', with Francis Newton Souza, Ara, Bakre, Gade, M. F. Husain and S. H. Raza among its founders, laid further ahead in 1948, Bombay .

In 1941, just days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore, she became seriously ill and slipped into a coma , and later died around midnight on December 6, 1941, leaving behind a large volume of work, and a mystery behind the real reason for death has never been ascertained, something expected in view of the overly sensationalised accounts of Amrita's life in the words of her contemporaries. A failed abortion and subsequent peritonitis also have been suggested as the possible causes . She was cremated on December 7, 1941 at Lahore .


The Government of India has declared her works as National Art Treasures , and most of them are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi , and a postage stamp depicting her painting 'Hill Women' was released in 1978 in India, and a road in Lutyens' Delhi, was named after her, Amrita Shergill Marg.

Besides remaining an inspiration to many a contemporary Indian artists, in 1993, she also became the inspiration behind, the famous Urdu play, by Javed Siddiqi, 'Tumhari Amrita', starring Shabana Azmi and Farooq Shaikh .

Her work is a key theme in the contemporary Indian novel "Faking It" by Amrita Chowdhury.

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Some of her masterpieces

Young Girls
Amrita’s sister Indira sits on the left clothed in chic European garb, while the partially undressed figure in the foreground is a French friend, Denise Proutaux. The two women, one poised and assured, the other more awkward with her face buried beneath streaming hair, have been as embodying different sides of the artist herself. This painting was awarded a Gold Medal at the Grand Salon in 1933.

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Self Portrait as Tahitian
Sher-Gil encountered the paintings of Paul Gauguin during a visit to the National Gallery in London. Gauguin used expressive colour and stylised figures to represent life on Tahiti, and his work influenced Sher-Gil’s own depictions of the non-western body. In Self Portrait as Tahitian she self-consciously plays on her status as the exotic ‘other’ in metropolitan Paris. It is likely that she worked from a photograph.

[cheeku17]

Three Girls
Her first major painting on returning to India, Three Girls shows Sher-Gil beginning to move away from the academic style of painting that she had studied in Paris Presenting the figures in close foreground, there is no attempt to establish their surroundings. Nonetheless, their resigned expressions and passive postures suggest the artist’s close understanding of their plight. As Sher-Gil wrote, ‘I am personally trying to be, through the medium of line, colour and design, an interpreter of the life of the people, particularly the life of the poor and sad.’

[cheeku17]

Hill Women
In her letters, Sher-Gil expressed her disdain for contemporary representations of India which depicted a beautiful landscape while acknowledging the suffering of the poor only as a sentimental picturesque detail. Tellingly, her own paintings focus on people rather than their surroundings. The critic Yashodhara Dalmia has praised the balance of form and content in this work: ‘the silhouette of women standing in a grave silence, reminiscent of tombstones, is in effect an elegy to the living’

[cheeku17]

South Indian Villagers Going to Market

In 1936-7, Sher-Gil undertook a trip through southern India, and saw the 7th and 8th century cave paintings at Ajanta for the first time. The large fresco-like paintings that followed capture her impressions of the south, but also represent her direct response to Ajanta, which she admired as a supreme example of classical Indian art. Here she brings a new sense of movement and colour to her depiction of Indian life, compared to the more static scenes that she portrayed at Shimla.

[cheeku17]

Woman on Charpai
One of Sher-Gil’s recurrent themes is the isolated lifestyle of women living on feudal estates, immersed in their private thoughts and desires. She acknowledged the influence of Moghul miniatures on this work, which she described as ‘a girl in red flowered clothes (the Punjabi dress, tight red trousers, shirt and veil)… reclining in a charpoy, its posts of an incandescent red rose round her like tongues of flame… It is a sensual picture, but not sensual in the effete rather repulsive manner of some of our good Bombay fine art

[vishal3g]

very nice share.....

[honybee]

nice..........
thnx 4 sharing

[basanti<<<]

Amrita Sher-Gil (अमृता शेरगिल) (January 30, 1913 , – December 5, 1941),

Amrita Sher-Gil was an eminent Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo, and today considered an important women painter of 20th century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance ; she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India
Today, she is amongst Nine Masters, whose work was declared as art treasures by The Archaeological Survey of India, in 1976 and 1979 , and over 100 of her paintings are now displayed at National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, Hungary to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and also a scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, and Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Jewish Opera singer from Hungary. Sher-Gil was the elder of two daughters born. Her younger sister was Indira Sundaram , mother of the contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. She spent most of early childhood in Budapest. She was the niece of Indologist Ervin Baktay.
In 1921 her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla in India .Though she was already painting since the age of five she formally started learning painting at age eight.

Amrita with her sister Indira, 1922

At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as a painter at Paris, first at the Grande Chaumiere under Pierre Vaillant and later at École des Beaux-Arts (1930-34) , she drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, while coming under the influence of her teacher Lucien Simon and the company of artist friends and lovers like Boris Tazlitsky. Her early paintings display a significant influence of the Western modes of painting, especially as being practised in the Bohemian circles of Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, she made her first important work, Young Girls , which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933, making her the youngest ever and the only Asian to have received this recognition hence.


In 1934, while in Europe she "began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India,".. "feeling in some strange way that there lay my destiny as a painter", as she later wrote about her return to India, in the same year . Soon she began a rediscovery of the traditions of Indian art which was to continue till her death. She stayed at their family home at Summer Hill, Shimla, for a while, before leaving for travel, in 1936, at the behest of an art collector and critic, Karl Khandalavala, who encouraged her to pursue her passion for discovering her Indian roots ; subsequently she was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and Pahari schools of painting and cave paintings at Ajanta Caves.

Amrita Sher-Gil in her studio in Shimla, photographed by father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, 1937.

In 1937, she toured South India and produced the famous South Indian trilogy paintings, Bride's Toilet', 'Brahmacharis' and 'The South Indian Villagers' that reveal her passionate sense of colour and an equally passionate empathy for her Indian subjects, who are often depicted in their poverty and despair, by now the transformation in her work was complete and she had found her 'artistic mission', to express the life of Indian people through her canvas, as she herself admitted .

This was distinct from European phase, in the interwar years, when her work showed an engagement with the works of Hungarian painters, especially the Nagybanya school of painting, .


Sher-Gil married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Victor Egan in 1938, and moved with him to India, to stay at her paternal family's home in Saraya, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, thus began her second phase in painting, which equals in its impact on Indian Modern Art, with likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy of Bengal school of art, as the 'Calcutta Group' of artists movement, which transformed it later, in a big way, was yet to start in 1943, and the 'Progressive Artist's Group', with Francis Newton Souza, Ara, Bakre, Gade, M. F. Husain and S. H. Raza among its founders, laid further ahead in 1948, Bombay .

In 1941, just days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore, she became seriously ill and slipped into a coma , and later died around midnight on December 6, 1941, leaving behind a large volume of work, and a mystery behind the real reason for death has never been ascertained, something expected in view of the overly sensationalised accounts of Amrita's life in the words of her contemporaries. A failed abortion and subsequent peritonitis also have been suggested as the possible causes . She was cremated on December 7, 1941 at Lahore .


The Government of India has declared her works as National Art Treasures , and most of them are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi , and a postage stamp depicting her painting 'Hill Women' was released in 1978 in India, and a road in Lutyens' Delhi, was named after her, Amrita Shergill Marg.

Besides remaining an inspiration to many a contemporary Indian artists, in 1993, she also became the inspiration behind, the famous Urdu play, by Javed Siddiqi, 'Tumhari Amrita', starring Shabana Azmi and Farooq Shaikh .

Her work is a key theme in the contemporary Indian novel "Faking It" by Amrita Chowdhury.

good to know her..she was pretty too +

[machinehead]

Self Portrait as Tahitian
Sher-Gil encountered the paintings of Paul Gauguin during a visit to the National Gallery in London. Gauguin used expressive colour and stylised figures to represent life on Tahiti, and his work influenced Sher-Gil’s own depictions of the non-western body. In Self Portrait as Tahitian she self-consciously plays on her status as the exotic ‘other’ in metropolitan Paris. It is likely that she worked from a photograph.

[cheeku17]

very nice share.....

nice..........
thnx 4 sharing

thanks for liking

good to know her..she was pretty too +

yess she was pretty ... thanks for the repps and reply

[Nin_13]

Nice..... Thanks for info.

[sens]

i wish i were a famous painter....


rep+++++++++

[sens]

finally rep=+++++++++++