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.” (Amrita Sher-Gil, “Evolution of my Art”, as reproduced in Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram et al, Amrita Sher-Gil, Bombay: Marg Publications, 1972, p. 139)

Amrita Sher-Gil, an enigmatic and assertive individualist, possessed an artistic fervour that... “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.” (Amrita Sher-Gil, “Evolution of my Art”, as reproduced in Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram et al, Amrita Sher-Gil, Bombay: Marg Publications, 1972, p. 139)

Amrita Sher-Gil, an enigmatic and assertive individualist, possessed an artistic fervour that characterised her brief yet impactful career as an artist. “She was dogmatic and unswerving in her ideas, but her opinions sprang from her inmost being; they were part of her dynamic self.” (Baldoon Dhingra, “Some Reminiscences of Amrita Sher-Gil”, Marg: A Magazine of Architecture and Art, Vol 1, No 1, Marg Publications: Mumbai, October 1946, p. 70) Emphasising her unique vision, Sher-Gil prioritised the human figure above all else, and she established a distinctive figurative style with little regard for landscape. Her enquiries were motivated by questions of identity, arising from her Indo-European parenting, that led to a remarkable painterly language which was a culmination of inspirations from traditional Indian and modern European art.

Sher-Gil was born in 1913, in Budapest, to parents from diverse and culturally rich backgrounds. Her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, hailed from an aristocratic family in Punjab and was a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian with an interest in philosophy. Her mother, Marie Antoinette, was Hungarian and was a trained opera singer. From the tender age of five, Sher-Gil immersed herself in drawing and painting with watercolours. Her early works consisted of vibrant illustrations of Hungarian fairy tales with captivating characters. In 1921, the Sher-Gil family returned to India and settled in Shimla. It was there that she honed her keen observational skills, capturing the essence of those around her through meticulous sketches.

“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 with 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...” (Vivan Sundaram, “Amrita Sher-Gil: Life and Work,” Amrita Sher-Gil, Bombay: Marg Publications, 1972, p. 9) Ervin Baktay, Amrita’s uncle, who started off his career as a painter, arrived at Shimla from Hungary to spend some time with the Sher-Gils in 1927. Acknowledging the young girl’s penchant for drawing, Baktay encouraged her to sketch from live models focusing on facial expressions and body forms. This guidance played a pivotal role in shaping her fascination with the human figure and the thematic development that would characterise her artistic journey.

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 Chaumière 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 École des Beaux-Arts, where she studied till 1933. Paris provided an ideal setting for both her artistic and personal growth, fostering an environment conducive to learning and exploration. Resonating with the Bohemian lifestyle, Sher-Gil blossomed into a vibrant individual, leaving a lasting impression with her vivacious personality that remains widely celebrated. Here she learnt human anatomy and explored the potential of line, form, and colour. She sketched and studied male and female nudes incessantly from 1930 to 1932, predominantly academic in style. “Also around 1930 she started working in 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... Her painting Young Girls won the Gold Medal in 1933, leading to her election as an associate of the Grand Salon.” (Sundaram, p. 10)

In 1933-1934, Sher-Gil’s artworks underwent a noticeable transformation, as pointed out by Vivan Sundaram, revealing a heightened sense of intimacy and reflective portrayal in her depiction of subjects. "In some of them we find a definite change, a more sophisticated application of paint, and an introspective withdrawn mood in the figures.” (Sundaram, p. 10) Perhaps, this was a reflection of deep contemplation and longing to return to India-"... toward the end of 1933 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 Sundaram, p. 13) In the following year, in September 1934, she articulates: “Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps never realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than a whole Renaissance.” (Artist quoted in Sundaram, p. 13)

At the close of 1934, Sher-Gil returned to India and seamlessly assimilated into elite social circles. During this period, she created portraits of her family and friends, showcasing a departure in style from her earlier works in Paris. “It becomes evident from the very beginning that she is attempting to evolve an Indian type of face and figure, and introducing within that a range of physiognomical and psychological variations. She does this by generalising and simplifying her observations—deriving her types by a process of stylisation.” (Geeta Kapur, “The Evolution of Content in Amrita Sher-Gil’s Paintings,” Amrita Sher-Gil, Bombay: Marg Publications, 1972, p. 41)

Despite her endeavour, Sher-Gil’s artwork elicits a gaze that employs stereotypes, while the simplification of forms bears resemblance to the style of post- Impressionist artists, most notably Paul Gauguin. Deliberately selecting her subjects, she uses them as pictorial explorations to represent the essence of Indian life and its people. She explains, “I aim to be an interpreter of the lives of people, especially those who are impoverished and sorrowful, through the medium of line, color, and design. However, I approach this task from a more abstract perspective, focusing on the purely pictorial aspects, not only because I am a painter but also because I disdain superficial emotional manipulation.” (Kapur, p. 42)

Until 1937, Sher-Gil painted in a similar style, firmly believing in the importance of stylization and simplification of forms as fundamental artistic principles. The year before, in November 1936, she embarked on an extensive journey to South India, beginning from Bombay, to Ajanta, Ellora, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Cochin, Cape Comorin, and Madurai. During her time in Bombay, she had the opportunity to meet lawyer and scholar Karl Khandalavala, who introduced her to a collection of miniature paintings. Sher-Gil was particularly captivated by the Basohli school. Additionally, she was awe-inspired by the magnificent murals at Ajanta, Padmanabhapuram, and Mattancheri. It is likely that she felt a strong affinity with their stylistic grandeur and aspired to learn from these rich artistic traditions. “During this long trip through the south, her imagination seems to have unfolded along with the environments she traversed; it gained in richness and variety, as it did in detail.” (Kapur, p. 47) In the late-1930s, Sher-Gil produced notable masterpieces such as In the Ladies’ Enclosure and Boys with Lemons. These revered compositions adopted a compositional style with close-knit figures, drawing inspiration from the narrative potency found in Indian painting and mural traditions.

Sher-Gil sought to explore the realm of domestic life and, as Geeta Kapur states, her works possessed both aesthetic beauty and a nuanced social commentary. (Kapur, p. 10) This can be observed in the meticulous composition of The Story Teller, 1937, which portrays a group of women engaged in conversation within a relaxed household setting–casual postures carrying out mundane tasks such as eating paan, talking and listening, and waving a hand-fan, in the company of affectionate animals. The gestures and positions of the figures convey a sense of naturalness, oblivious to any observer. She was “opting for a less grandiose, more relaxed attitude to her Indian subjects: the affecting complicity between the village women informally grouped in a courtyard with a calf nosing its way in their midst (Story Teller)...” (Deepak Ananth, Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist Family of the Twentieth Century, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2007, p. 24)

With reference to the present lot, Karl Khandalavala observes that it sought inspiration in Pahari painting- “The cows, the women folk, and the setting, though all far removed in technique from those of Basohli miniature, are pregnant with its lyricism and vivid colour.” (Karl Khandalavala, “Amrita Sher-Gil”, The Indian Annual, Bombay: Times of India Press, 1948, p. 6) The deliberate use of various shades of white for the background wall in this work evokes the traditional use of white as a fundamental element for structuring in mural and miniature painting traditions. Here it is pertinent to note that Sher-Gil always painted from models, setting up scenes and manipulating the appearance of her subjects. While her practice of drawing from posed models was common, the present lot is unique for it was painted plein air. In a letter addressed to scholar and art critic R C Tandan in November 1937, she describes the distinct nature of her works during this time- “I have also done a few outdoor compositions on a smaller scale, rather interesting and curiously enough, completely different in spirit and execution from the large ones— I wonder why?” (Vivan Sundaram ed., Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 2, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010, p. 419)

The present lot, along with other seminal works painted during the time, is a splendid example of the artist’s most honest and expressive compositions. The dominant subjects are women, who feature in many of Sher- Gil works, “primarily because she could lend her empathetic self most easily to their condition. Her emergent forms were those in which women’s very essence could be communicated, so that they represented a persona and a will of their own. Perhaps her own personality infused many of them as she archived their subterranean selves–their circumscribed lives, the grittiness of their existence, their surrender to a fate that could not be changed and yet their passionate yearning for the other.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, New Delhi: Penguin, 2006, pp. 145-146) Sher-Gil portrayed women not as tragic figures, but as individuals who possessed awareness of their fate and the ability to rise above it.

Of a similar painting featuring a group of women, Giles Tillotson writes, “In an image where the women seem detached from each other, each directing her gaze inwards... the pictorial form establishes relations between them; it tells us that even in their introspection they are bound by a group.” (“Painter of Concern: Critical Writing on Amrita Sher-Gil,” India International Centre Quarterly, January 1998, New Delhi, quoted in Dalmia, p. 149) When portraying women, Sher-Gil treated her subjects with a sense of protectiveness, affording them their own seclusion within her compositions. This can be observed in the present artwork, where a male figure is deliberately excluded from engaging in the women’s discussion and is almost eclipsed by the shadow of the enclosure.

The present lot was exhibited at Sher-Gil’s successful solo exhibition at Faletti’s Hotel, Lahore, in November 1937. The exhibition was inaugurated by Manohar Lal, then Finance Minister in the Punjab government, and Charles Fabri, a Hungarian archaeologist and curator of the Lahore Museum, reviewed it for the Civil and Military Gazette. In the same year, an exhibition of Sher-Gil’s works was arranged by R C Tandan, who was the secretary of the Hindustani Academy in Allahabad and later director of the Allahabad Museum, at the Roerich Centre of Art and Culture. The two subsequently stayed in touch and planned to print a portfolio of her works which was eventually published posthumously with an introduction written by Karl Khandalavala. The Story Teller was among the twelve works selected by Sher-Gil herself and called them her most important works.

Badruddin Tyabji Jr. (1907-1995), the grandson of Badruddin Tyabji (1844-1906) who was President of the Indian National Congress in 1887, purchased The Story Teller at the Lahore exhibition, which was deeply appreciated by Sher- Gil. As a diplomat in the Indian Civil Service and later Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Tyabji Jr. knew the artist through mutual relationships. In Memoirs of an Egoist (1988) he wrote a detailed account of his observations about Sher-Gil. He also cites the importance of Sher-Gil as an artist in Chaff and Grain, 1962- “Amrita Sher-Gil’s greatest contribution to Indian painting has been to achieve what India has lost in so many fields, and for so many centuries, a synthesis of the East and West on equal terms. ‘A marriage of the East and West’ like the blending of Aryan and Dravidian art in the dawn of our history; and again, not by a superficial blending of European and Indian technique, but by a crossing of spiritual tendencies. Her paintings are a vindication of the value of internationalism in art; her personality a triumph of nationality over environment.”

Sher-Gil’s artistic journey formed a bridge between her exposure to European influences and her deep connection to India, with realism serving as the link. In the present lot, we witness the assimilation of her influences, drawing upon her familiarity with the techniques employed by post-Impressionist artists during her time in Paris, as well as the neorealism movement that she encountered predominantly in Hungary during her summer breaks. Nilima Sheikh comments, “In Storyteller (1937) the life of people in the Himachali village and small town finds easy compatibility with the gentle humanism of Pahari painting on the one hand and post-Impressionist figure-space gestalt on the other.” (Nilima Sheikh, “On Amrita Sher-Gil: Claiming a Radiant Legacy,” Gayatri Sinha ed., Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1996, p. 26)

In 1938 Sher-Gil went back to Hungary for a year and painted in European themes and treatment. On returning to India, she continued painting with an increased Indian sensibility and influence from miniatures. “But her later paintings are more subtly human, and more indigenous in their idiom. It seems this quality would have become a sustained part of her own character and that of her pictorial conception in the subsequent years.” (Kapur, p. 52) Sher-Gil passed away unexpectedly on 5 December 1941 in Lahore after a brief illness, at the young age of 28. In 1976, she was declared one of India’s nine ‘National Art Treasure’ artists by the Archaeological Survey of India.

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