Important Notice

“It seems to me that I never began painting, that I have always painted. And I have always had, with a strange certitude, the conviction that I was meant to be a painter and nothing else. Although I studied, I have never been taught in the actual sense of the word, because I possess in my psychological make-up a peculiarity that resents any outside interference. I have always, in everything, wanted to find out things for myself.” - AMRITA... “It seems to me that I never began painting, that I have always painted. And I have always had, with a strange certitude, the conviction that I was meant to be a painter and nothing else. Although I studied, I have never been taught in the actual sense of the word, because I possess in my psychological make-up a peculiarity that resents any outside interference. I have always, in everything, wanted to find out things for myself.” - AMRITA SHER-GIL

The legend of Amrita Sher-Gil is one that has continued to shine bright in the eight decades (and more) that have passed since her death. Her manner of representing the people and the surroundings she encountered in her life between India, Hungary, and France makes her a force to reckon with in the landscape of modern Indian art.

Her artistic contributions in a career that spanned just over a decade was so tremendous that she managed to change the very direction of Indian art history while simultaneously inspiring generations of artists. "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 was born in Budapest on 30 January 1913 on "a dark winter morning" with "knee deep" snow 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. (Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 1, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, p. xxxiii) Her unique parentage and social status provided her with a level of privilege that was unheard of for Indian women at the time, giving her the freedom to fearlessly tread unchartered waters.

Sher-Gil spent the first eight years of her life in Hungary and developed strong emotional bonds with her mother's side of the family. The impact of these experiences during her childhood years was so deep that she would go on "to maintain this marker of her Hungarian identity and family bonds till the end of her life, even after she returned to India." (Sundaram ed., p. xxxiii)

THE INFLUENCE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

A child prodigy in art, Sher-Gil showed an intense penchant for drawing and painting from the early age of six - one that was consistently encouraged by her mother. Her earliest subjects ranged from coloured illustrations of "Hungarian folk stories and fairy tales by the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen" during her school years at Dunaharaszti, Hungary to painting impressions of female characters from films and novels. (Sundaram ed., p. xxxvi) This proclivity for art continued even after the Sher-Gil family returned to Simla in 1921 and the next few years saw her artistic skill develop further.

In Simla, Sher-Gil and her sister Indira were home-schooled where they learnt both English and French. Sher-Gil continued to paint during this phase and "filled her sketchbooks with water colours." (Sundaram ed., p. xxxviii)

The year 1923 saw a change in Sher-Gil's life and artistic journey. This was the year when Italian sculptor Giulio Cesare Pasquinelli visited Simla and struck up a friendship with Marie Antoinette. She commissioned him to make portraits of herself and her daughters. It was also during the same year that Sher-Gil won her first prize for art, which caught her mother's attention. "Recognizing that her talent was well ahead that of a normal ten-year-old, Marie Antoinette wanted her daughter to be exposed to wider horizons and the highest levels of artistic achievement, of which Florence was the pinnacle at that time." (Sundaram ed., p. xxxviii)

And so, Marie Antoinette decided to travel to Florence with her daughters in order to give Sher-Gil access to the best the art world had to offer at the time and to be taught by Pasquinelli himself. They set sail for Italy at the start of 1924 and lived there for a brief period. Both Sher-Gil and her sister were enrolled in a school in Florence, which they disliked. Sher-Gil soon "revolted against both the school and her mother and demanded that they return to India, which they did, by June the same year." (Sundaram ed., p. xxxvix) Even though Sher-Gil's Italian experience was short-lived, it is possible that the few months she spent being exposed to the art of Italian masters saw a direct influence in her artistic style.

Upon their return to Simla, Marie Antoinette ensured that Sher-Gil continued painting. She appointed British artists Major Whitmarsh and Hal Bevan Petman to train Sher-Gil, even though their conventional artistic styles might not have been the best fit for her. Sher-Gil's art was undergoing a transformation during this time, most likely influenced by her time in Florence as well as her increasing maturity.

"The drawings and water colours Amrita did between the ages of eleven and fourteen (1924 to 1927) are related to a growing awareness of herself. By 1927, Amrita had been in India for six years, yet the people and landscape in her drawings and paintings are entirely European. In her earlier work she draws a thin tremulous line, wistful maidens naked and lost in forests. Later her characters (and here a strong influence of books and films manifests itself) and the women in particular are shown with their faces tense with suppressed emotion, either attempting suicide or threatening to stab the men they are with." (Vivan Sundaram, "Amrita Sher-Gil - Life and Work," Marg, Volume XXV, Number 2, Bombay: Marg Publications, March 1972, p. 9)

Another key figure who played a critical role in the development of Sher-Gil's career as an artist at this time was her uncle, Ervin Baktay, who came to visit the Sher-Gils in the summer of 1926. Upon observing Sher-Gil's artistic talent, he "guided her to move away from her highly emotional early paintings and to draw from reality, emphasizing structure rather than naturalism." (Sundaram ed., p. xl)

He introduced Sher-Gil to different styles of painting and encouraged her to develop a sense of autonomy, to observe her surroundings and reality and use them in her work. Under her uncle's direction, "her lines started to become strong and angular, whether in a head of Beethoven or a self-portrait" as she began to use live models for her art who were often members of the household. (Sundaram ed., p. xl) She practiced her craft by making life-like sketches of them - something she continued with all her life.

Upon Baktay's suggestion, and Marie Antoinette's insistence, that Sher-Gil be sent to Europe to study art, the family moved to Paris in 1929. There, Sher-Gil joined La Grande Chaumière and began to train under Pierre Vaillant. Later that year, she won admission to the studio of artist Lucien Simon at the École des Beaux-Arts where she studied till 1933.

PARIS AND A PENCHANT FOR PORTRAITURE

This period in France marked a critical cornerstone in Sher-Gil's life and career. The Parisian lifestyle "invigorated Sher-Gil's desire to paint, which she did with a conviction and maturity rarely seen in a 16-year-old. The ferocity of mind and her passionate love of what is beautiful transcended through her brush strokes into the hauntingly beautiful and forceful self-portraits and portraits of friends and lovers from that period." ("Amrita Sher-Gil: Revolution Personified, South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art, London: Christie's, 26 May 2015, online)

It was during this time that Sher-Gil developed a deeper interest in portraiture and figure studies. "From 1930 to 1932, Amrita did hundreds of sketches and studies of male and female nudes, mainly in charcoal. In these academic drawings the volume is emphasised by shading, and the energetic sweep of the line creates heavy, massive figures." (Sundaram, p. 10)

This interest emerged from her existing drawings of herself and other live models, that she'd worked on in her adolescence, wherein she had paid particular attention to details such as anatomical frame, facial structure, and the overall proportions of a person's features. "These pencil sketches dated 1927 demonstrate a raw energy and the redrawing/reworking of contours as a corrective means to attain visual accuracy in her depictions of the self. The same page has been used frequently to capture two or three postures tried out with some shift in the angle of perception." (Roobina Karode and Rakhee Balaram, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941): The Self in Making, New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2014, p. 10)

These skills would go on to hold her in good stead during her time as an art student in Paris where she learnt more than she'd ever expected about the human body and all its contours. Her training helped her when she began to work on her body of portraits, as well as her later works in India towards the end of her life. "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)

Sher-Gil's interest in portraiture was so deep that she painted nineteen self-portraits over the course of her brief career. She explored "a range of artistic styles and projections of the self" in them. While the self-portraits were primarily academic exercises, they also allowed Sher-Gil to "experiment with shifts in mood, clothing and character, and nineteenth-century artistic styles. This permitted her to use the self-portrait, as did many other artists before her, as a personal exercise without the requirement to satisfy patron or friends." (Karode and Balaram, p. 20)

A PORTRAIT OF HER MOTHER

It was also during this period that Sher-Gil began to work with oils for the first time. "Some of these are studies of models in the nude, a few are 'still lives' and a handful are landscapes; but mainly they are portraits and self portraits." (Sundaram, p. 10) The portraits were largely those of family and close friends who encouraged her artistic talent and helped her hone her skill. While her self-portraits showed Sher-Gil attempting to explore her identity by referencing a variety of independent or transgressive women in society, her portraits of family members and close friends are a reflection of the kind of relationship she shared with them.

The present lot, a portrait of Sher-Gil's mother, is a rare early work. It joins the ranks of other portraits and self portraits by Sher-Gil from this period that have appeared in auction in the recent past, including works such as Portrait of Denyse Prouteaux, circa 1932, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1931, and The Little Girl in Blue, 1934. However, what makes this lot particularly rare and unique is its subject. This is the only portrait of Marie Antoinette that was painted by Sher-Gil and was done on the request of her mother. The portrait is a departure from Sher-Gil's usual style of painting and is rendered in a manner that is more in line with the traditional style of portraiture that was in existence and was perhaps the Sher-Gil's way of acknowledging her mother's pivotal role in shaping her artistic career

What stands out in these self-portraits and portraits, including the present lot, is Sher-Gil's unique treatment of the female subject in the frame. There is a reflective quality in her painting, "a 'romantic' melancholy which remains a characteristic of her work throughout." (Geeta Kapur, "The Evolution of Content in Amrita Sher-Gil's Paintings," Marg, Volume XXV, Number 2, Bombay: Marg Publications, March 1972, p. 40) This quality is noticeable in this portrait of her mother, Marie Antoinette, even though they are believed to have shared a relatively contentious relationship. The painting shows the post-Impressionistic influences that were prevalent in Sher-Gil's works of this period, as is evident in the rich colours and the strong brush strokes.

Sher-Gil's palette for this portrait remains focussed on red and its varied shades. It manages to catch the observer's eye immediately and draws attention to the contrast between the vibrant red of Marie Antoinette's clothing and the slightly muted shade used for her hair. It is interesting to note Sher-Gil's control over her palette at such an early stage in her career. Each shade is distinct and doesn't get lost in the other. "The strong lines that contain the figure, only to be erased so that the image merges with the background, suggest that like the semi-transparent envelope that the writer Virginia Woolf sought to create around her characters, Amrita was interested in searching beyond the image of the person that she had before her." (Geeta Doctor, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Painted Life, New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2002, p. 26)

The choice of red for the background was made consciously - one that Sher-Gil repeated in many of her self portraits as well. By painting herself or, as in this case, her mother against a "flaming red background, [she is] revealing her desire to assert the individuality of her character in a dramatic way." (Sundaram, p. 10)

Another interesting element that draws the eye to Sher-Gil's Portrait of Mother is the jewellery. Marie Antoinette is shown to be wearing a long necklace made of pearls along with a diamond and emerald choker with matching earrings - a clear marker of the wealthy and privileged class she belonged to. Her facial features are small but well defined, but the red remains the focus of the portrait throughout. Through this, Sher-Gil manages to capture her mother's beauty, pride, and sense of self-assurance effectively on her canvas.

THE FINAL YEARS

As Sher-Gil grew older, her sensibilities matured, and so did her artistic skill. Yet, her talent for portraying emotion remained, as did her ability to bring out the nuances of the human body through her portraiture. This would manifest in the oil paintings that she worked on following her return to India in 1936 - paintings that often depicted women and were “handled with great sensitivity and not with superficial pity or condescension.” (Dalmia, p. 20)

Sher-Gil passed away suddenly on 5 January 1941 in Lahore after a brief illness at the young age of 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 an early work by one of the most important artists and pioneers of Indian modernism.

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