Amrita Sher-Gil, the fierce, independent and unapologetically sexual painter was known as ‘India’s Freida Kahlo’. It’s a tragedy that an Indian artist must always be called after someone in the west.
She stood in her own right – depicting reality and creating magic with colour. Her paintings reflected both herself and the subjects she chose. In her journey from Europe to India, she found influence in both East and West – making something that could rightfully be called her own. But she resisted all attempts to be labelled.
People in our country, when speaking of Art, are apt to think of it in terms of the various ‘Schools’—Bengal, Bombay, Lucknow, etc., rather than in terms of good Art and bad. Art. Oscar Wilde once said, ‘There are no moral and immoral books, only well written and badly written books.’
She was a child of mixed parentage – a fusion of cultures and identities. Her father was a Punjabi Sikh and her mother a Hungarian Jew. She was born in Budapest in 1913 and moved to Shimla in 1921 at the age of eight. While there, her uncle, Ervin Batkay, encouraged her to start painting from live subjects – and make use of the many servants in their home at Shimla. Ervin himself was a painter who had given up the arts to become an Indologist. Amrita kept painting and went to study art in Paris in 1929.
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