Important Notice

Amrita Sher-Gil - often deemed as the "Frida Kahlo" of Indian art - was not only one of the first women to emerge into the Indian art space, but was also an artist par excellence, considered one of India's most important artists of the 20th century. In her brief career spanning just about a decade, she was able to evolve a new language for modern Indian art, changing its course forever. "She went on to spearhead the path of modernity in Indian... Amrita Sher-Gil - often deemed as the "Frida Kahlo" of Indian art - was not only one of the first women to emerge into the Indian art space, but was also an artist par excellence, considered one of India's most important artists of the 20th century. In her brief career spanning just about a decade, she was able to evolve a new language for modern Indian art, changing its course forever. "She went on to spearhead the path of modernity in Indian art by imbuing her work with aspects of both Western and Eastern traditions. When she made the famous statement 'Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me' she did not realize that she had in fact entered the terrain where she would bridge the gap between widely divergent and yet interdependent systems and that in carving this path she would be showing the way for generations of artists." (Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher?Gil: A Life, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, p. xiii)

Sher-Gil's unique parentage and childhood experiences privileged her with a cosmopolitan and individualistic character that was unusual and rare for Indian women at that time, and enabled her to fearlessly tread uncharted waters. "Dalma-Amrita," as she was christened, was born on 30 January 1913 in in Budapest in 1913 to Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer, and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and a scholar of Persian and Sanskrit. A year later, her sister Indira was born, and the family continued to reside in Hungary for the next eight years. "The main language the two girls spoke when they were children was Hungarian, and Amrita was to maintain this marker of her Hungarian identity and family bonds till the end of her life, even after she returned to India." (Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 1, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2010, p. xxxiii)

Sher-Gil showed a proclivity to art at a very young age. By the time she was five, she was sketching illustrations of Hungarian folk stories and fairy tales, and even writing her own poems and stories. When the Sher-Gil family returned to India in 1921 and settled in Simla, her prodigious talent and obsessive painting had come to Marie Antoinette's attention, who recognised that her daughter's talent was far advanced for her age. Wanting to expand her horizons and expose her to "the highest levels of artistic achievements," she took her to Florence in 1924. However, school in Italy proved too dull and regimented for Amrita, and she returned to Simla in less than six months.

Back in Simla, Sher-Gil started art lessons with British artists Major Whitmarsh and Hal Bevan Petman, although their conventional style may not have yielded much. In the summer of 1926, Marie Antoinette's brother, Ervin Baktay, came to India and stayed with the Sher-Gils. "The painter in Ervin was quick to recognize Amrita's artistic talent, and he guided her to move away from her highly emotional early paintings and to draw from reality, emphasizing structure rather than naturalism. Under her uncle's direction, her lines started to become strong and angular..." (Sundaram, p. xl)

Upon Baktay's suggestion that Sher?Gil be sent to Europe to study art, the family moved to Paris in 1929, where she joined La Grande Chaumiere and began to train under Pierre Vaillant. Later that year, she competed for and won admission to the studio of artist Lucien Simon at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux - Arts, where she studied till 1933. During her three years there, Sher-Gil won prizes for her work at each of the Grand Salon, when her painting Young Girls was judged best in show. Only 18 at that time, Sher-Gil was the first Indian, perhaps even the first Asian, to achieve this distinction. "The years in Paris proved both purposeful and rewarding. There she learnt, for the first time, the mystery of the anatomy of the human form. She discovered the significance of line, form and colour. She fell under the spell of Gauguin and Cezanne??? Amrita was full of admiration for Modigliani... and her one great love was Vincent van Gogh... Though full of admiration for all these artists, Amrita was never either derivative or initiative..." (N Iqbal, "Amrita Sher-Gil," Roopa Lekha, Vol 53, 1982, pp. 47-59, accessed through criticalcollective.in, online)

Despite her rising success, Sher-Gil felt that Europe was not conducive to the growth of her art. She had realised that the study of European art had led her to appreciate Indian painting and sculpture - a realisation, paradoxically, she would not have arrived to if she had not come to Europe. "I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter." (Artist quoted in N Iqbal, criticalcollective.in, online)

Returning to India in 1934, Sher-Gil first stayed at her father's ancestral home in Amritsar, Punjab, where she painted Group of Three Girls, which won the Gold Medal at the 46th Bombay Art Society Annual Exhibition in 1937. This painting reflects the change in her colour palette, departing from the blues and greens of her Paris years towards the earthy reds and browns of her surroundings. "The lines and forms were a continuation of her years abroad, as the figures stood together in a studio pose, but their grave expressions, the sense of being at once together and isolated, would become the key motif of all her paintings in India." (Dalmia, p. 60) The sombre atmosphere that Dalmia refers to is vividly evident in the present lot.

Boys with Lemons, perhaps painted in the summer of 1935 when Sher-Gil was back in her family home at Simla, is an important work in Sher-Gil's oeuvre. The depiction of the two boys selling lemons, their expressions resigned and forlorn, was deliberate. "While the colours and sounds of India exhilarated Amrita, the poverty aroused a deep compassion in her. She wanted, she said, "to interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor Indians pictorially; to paint those images of infinite submission and patience; to depict their angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness, to reduce the impression their sad eyes created in me."... her success lay in achieving something that was neither sentimental nor pictorial but went beyond mere aestheticization of poverty to a reappraisal of deprivation and the attitude of the privileged." (Dalmia, p. 74)

With works like the present lot, Sher-Gil was attempting to carve her own identity "in consonance with the reality of India... She could look back on this period in her life as a fecund, fertile one which resulted in fresh discoveries." (Dalmia, p. 75) In the next few years, Sher-Gil travelled across India, which led to fascinating encounters with painters, royalty, art historians like Karl Khandalavala and Charles Fabri, and even political stalwarts like Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1938, while in Hungary, she married her cousin Victor Egan, and the couple would eventually settle at her fathe''s family estate in Saraya, Gorakhpur. Her experiences in these new places informed her art, and she would create a revolutionary body of work that was at once modern and Indian, but uniquely her own. As expressive as she was with her art, Sher-Gil was also vocal with her thoughts, often contributing several essays on her thoughts about modern Indian art and the form it must acquire. In many ways, she was one of the earliest critics of 20th century Indian art and a seminal influence for future generations of Indian artists.

Sher-Gil passed away suddenly on 5 January 1941 in Lahore after a brief illness. She was only 28. In her short lifetime, Sher-Gil made a very limited number of works, of which 172 have been documented, 95 are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, and two more are in institutional collections in Chandigarh and Lahore. In 1972, Sher-Gil was declared one of India's nine 'National Art Treasure' artists by the Archaeological Survey of India, and her works are not allowed to leave the country. The present lot offers a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for collectors of modern Indian art to acquire a work by one of the most important artists and pioneers of Indian modernism.

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