Important Notice

Amrita Sher-Gil is perhaps one of the most enigmatic, fascinating and brilliant artists to have existed in Indian art history, whose artistic contribution and presence changed its very course, inspiring and impacting generations of artists even today. In her brief career spanning just about a decade, she was able to evolve a new language for modern Indian art. "She went on to spearhead the path of modernity in Indian art by imbuing her work with... Amrita Sher-Gil is perhaps one of the most enigmatic, fascinating and brilliant artists to have existed in Indian art history, whose artistic contribution and presence changed its very course, inspiring and impacting generations of artists even today. In her brief career spanning just about a decade, she was able to evolve a new language for modern Indian art. "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)

AN ARTISTIC CHILDHOOD

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 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, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 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. Lots 11 and 12 were likely sketched during this time. He introduced Amrita to different styles of painting and encouraged her to develop a sense of autonomy, to observe her surroundings and reality and use these observations in her work. Under her uncle's direction, Sher-Gil began using live models for her art - often members of the household - making lifelike sketches of them, and maintained this practice all her life.

THE PARIS YEARS

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 des Beaux-Arts, where she studied till 1933. During her three years there, Sher-Gil won prizes for her work at the Grand Salon and one of her paintings, 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. 4759, 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)

In the Ladies' Enclosure is a seminal work of art in Sher-Gil's oeuvre, marking the zenith of her artistic evolution. Painted in 1938 during the last few years of her life, it is the outcome of decades of arriving into her own as an artist - from a childhood spent developing her promising talent, her formative years in Paris, and finally, returning to India where she rediscovered her roots and found her motivations.
.br.IN SEARCH OF HER ROOTS

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 continued to present itself in most of Sher-Gil's paintings, including the present lot.

Sher-Gil's choice of subjects was inspired by her surroundings. "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) This sadness resonated with some inner trait in her own nature, and she considered this aspect of human life "beautiful," more so than those aspects of life that are happy or content.

In 1936, she shifted her base to the family's sprawling estate in Saraya, Gorakhpur. This next two years were marked by increased creative output and frequent travels, including a trip to Bombay, where she met the critic and curator Karl Khandalavala, and a sojourn of South India, which proved to be a pivotal point in her journey that would shape her future work. She was deeply impressed by the cave paintings of Ajanta and Ellora and attempted to integrate this influence into her own art. The works she made during this time are distinctly set apart from the realist watercolour mode of painting that was in trend back then.

IN THE LADIES' ENCLOSURE

Back at Saraya, she painted the present lot. In this quiet but powerful composition, Sher-Gil depicts a group of women in a field. Her choice of colour palette is perhaps an attempt to "bring out the contrast between the hot reds and the greens, one finds in the early Rajput miniatures... she achieved her best results, as in the last phase of her Paris period, when, apart from the form, she worked at building the structure of the composition as well." (Dalmia, pp. 106-107)

In a letter to Khandalavala, dated 13 April 1938, Sher-Gil describes this as: "...a composition in which horizontal lines dominate. A slab of pale green sky, a horizontal coral-coloured wall in the distance, a slice of flat ground dotted with tiny figures carrying pitchers, and enclosed by a low olive-green hedge is a foreground of dull green grass studded with tiny pink and red birds. A row of sitting women in pungent colours and a thin black dog accentuate the horizontal lines. A couple of hibiscus bushes with carmine blossoms and a standing girl break the horizontal accent ever so slightly." (Quoted in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, Volume 2, p. 483) She was also attempting plein air painting, incorporating the rich stylistic features of Rajput and Pahari miniature painting. "In these she freely ignored the actual landscapes but used them in part in her compositions and colour organizations. Nor were the landscapes a motif for the foreground but were an integral part of the composition." (Dalmia, p. 107)

Works such as this one were of special significance for Sher-Gil during this time, for she found herself in an unusually content phase. In the same letter to Khandalavala, she says: "I have been curiously happy the last few months, I don't know why. These little compositions are the expression of my happiness and that is why perhaps I am particularly fond of them and will always have a tender spot in my heart for them, even when my calm vanishes and the little compositions along with them." (Quoted in Sundaram, p. 483)

The dominant subjects in the present lot, women, 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." (Dalmia, pp. 145-146) Sher-Gil's depiction of women did not paint them as tragic figures, but as those individuals who were aware of their fate and capable of transcending 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)

AHEAD OF HER TIME

The women in these paintings were perhaps an extension of the artist's own journey. Sher-Gil's path into establishing herself as a reputable artist was a lonely and arduous one, and she had to create her own circumstances and successes within the patriarchal and restrictive conditions of early 20th century India. "It was little wonder that the body language of Amrita's women were suffused with a haunted self, a self which refused to die and refused to live. It was not quite a celebration nor an elegy to the women who had yet to be born. Yet the expressive gestures, the nuanced movements and the intensity of the gaze made the women emblematic of their times and markers of history and memory. The feminine yearning to fulfil herself was immortalized by Amrita, and the paths of generations of artists who followed her were illuminated by the trail she blazed." (Dalmia, p. 154)

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 a work by one of the most important artists and pioneers of Indian modernism.

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