The majority of works by Amrita Sher- Gil in the public domain are with the NGMA, which houses over 100 paintings by this meteoric artist. Born of a Sikh father from an aristocratic, land owing family, and a Hungarian mother, Amrita Sher-Gil’s life veered between Europe and India. She was blessed with beauty, breeding, charismatic personality and extra ordinary talent as a painter.
In 1929, she joined the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her painting skills were recognized and acclaimed; she loved the bohemian life of artists in Paris. Sher-Gil’s painting style at this time reflected the European idiom with its naturalism and textured application of paint. Many of the paintings done in the early 1930s are in the European style, and include a number of self portraits. There are also many paintings of life in Paris, nude studies, still life studied, as well as portraits of friends and fellow students. Of these, the self portraits form a significant corpus. They captured the artist in her many moods- somber, pensive and joyous- while revealing a narcissistic streak in her personality.
Her style underwent a radical change by the mid- 30s. she yearn for India, and by 1934, the family returned. This time, she looked at India with the eyes of an artist. The colours, the textures, the vibrancy and the earthiness of the people had a deep impact on the young artist. In India, she appropriated the language of miniatures.
The complexities of her life- she was of mixed parentage and her art school background in Paris made her both, an insider and outsider, as did her ambivalent sexuality- promoted her to constantly reinvent her visual language. She sought to reconcile her modern sensibility with her enthusiastic response to traditional art-historical resources.
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