Book Review: Amrita Sher-Gil- Art & Life - A Reader

Book: Amrita Sher-Gil: Art & Life - A Reader

Author: Yashodhara Dalmia

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Pages: 348

Price: Rs 995

"It was impossible not to react emotionally to the personality of so wonderful a woman, so divinely gifted, so astonishingly versatile and so brilliant in anything that she had touched: whether it was painting or music- in which she was the equal of almost any great artists on the concert platform - or literature, which she wrote with a facility rarely given to any but the most devoted stylist, or, say, languages which she spoke the east of a born linguist."

"...she had that bold brazen kind of look that makes timid men like me turn their gaze down.... She was short and sallow complexioned...Her hair was parted in the middle and tightly bound at the back. She had a bulbous nose, with blackheads showing. She had thick lips with a faint shadow of a moustache. Politeness, I discovered, was not one of her virtues...."

The above passages by Charles Fabri and Khushwant Singh, respectively, describe the two divergent narratives that have come to define the public discourse around Amrita Sher-Gil. Its broad outlines, roughly sketched, are - talented, troubled, sexually bold female artist of mixed parentage who trains at the acclaimed Ecole des Beaux-Art in Paris, returns to India to connect with her roots and goes around the country absorbing its sights and artistic traditions, accumulating admirers and lovers; she paints a few exceptional canvases and then dies at the age of 28, her potential tragically unrealised.

Sensitive and mercurial, promiscuous and profligate, tempestuous and temperamental - these binaries have become the defining myth of Sher-Gil. Even now, despite all the acclaim that she has rightfully drawn, Sher-Gil has not benefited from a critical revisal that would redeem her persona from the male, often misogynist reading of her life and career. Almost every estimation of the artist foregrounds her frank sexuality as, no doubt, she herself did with her images of female nudes, in some of which she did not hesitate to put herself.

The present book, seems intended primarily for art history students. Here are essays by Fabri and Karl Khandalavala, the two men who did more than any others to lay the foundation of her reputation in the early years of her career. There are passages from Sher-Gil's own diaries, artist and art teacher K.G. Subrahmanyan's analysis of how she drew from both Ajanta and Gauguin, while G.H.R. Tillotson, curator, does an overview of how critics and artists have regarded the artist over the years. Eminent art historian-critic Yashodhara Dalmia, who has edited the volume, contributes an art historical essay which seeks to place Sher-Gil among the vigorous experiments with style and subject matter that were occupying the artists of the decades just before and after independence.

General readers will find more rewarding Esther Rahim's personal testimony. Rahim, a German painter who married a Pakistani and was influenced by Sher-Gil, writes with empathy of her art and her struggles for self-expression. Another account is that of Katalin Keseru, an art historian who untangles the web of influences both artistic and cultural on Sher-Gil in Hungary and Paris; influences which were important to her as an artist.