Important Notice

Lot 3

 

Quick Zoom

"Europe Belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me."

Amrita Sher-Gil is one of India's most important artists of the 20th century and her works are by far the rarest. In her brief career spanning just about a decade, and with only 172 paintings made during her lifetime, she was able to evolve a new language for modern Indian art, changing its course forever. During this period, she led an extraordinarily... "Europe Belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me."

Amrita Sher-Gil is one of India's most important artists of the 20th century and her works are by far the rarest. In her brief career spanning just about a decade, and with only 172 paintings made during her lifetime, she was able to evolve a new language for modern Indian art, changing its course forever. During this period, she led an extraordinarily interesting life filled with fascinating encounters with painters, royalty, art historians like Karl Khandalavala and Charles Fabri, and even political stalwarts like Jawaharlal Nehru.

"She had a Sikh aristocrat father and a Hungarian mother and was born at the turn of the century, in 1913 in Budapest. 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, Penguin, New Delhi, 2006).

Her earliest diaries, dated from 1920 when she was just seven, are filled with drawings and paintings illustrating the Hungarian folk tales she was told as a child. In Simla, her family noticed and encouraged her talent, taking her to Florence in 1924, where she might better study art. However, school in Italy proved too dull and regimented for Amrita, and she returned to Simla in less than six months.

In 1929, the Sher-Gils moved to Paris, where Amrita 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 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 school's annual competitions, and in 1932, exhibited at the Grand Salon in Paris. A year later, she was appointed the youngest Associate of the Grand Salon, when her painting 'Young Girls' was judged best in show.

"Such an achievement proves that almost from the very first she was able to paint with accuracy and precision. She could represent what she saw and however much she might later depart from natural appearances, the ability to copy nature was hers" (W.G. Archer, India and Modern Art, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1959, p. 83).

"Around 1930 she started working in oils for the first time, and during these three years produced over sixty paintings. 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" (Vivan Sundaram, "Amrita Sher-Gil: Life and Work", Marg, Vol. 25, No. 2, Mumbai, 1972, p. 10). The fact that the present lot is one of the only landscapes she painted during this period of her career, adds to its significance in the context of her limited oeuvre.

Executed with the confidence of a well established artist and displaying a maturity surprising for Sher-Gil's years, this landscape portrays a grassy path meandering along a thatched wall. While the light in the foreground is dappled, passing through a stand of tall trees on the right, the sky beyond them is a bright, clear blue. It is likely that Sher-Gil painted this work en plein air during one of the many holidays she spent in the Hungarian village of Zebegény on the banks of the Danube, over the course of her stay in Paris. Writing to her mother from Zebegény in August 1932, Amrita speaks about her painting, saying, "Of late I've been working a great deal. I do nothing but paint the whole day. I got hold of a Gypsy girl who is willing to pose for me in "plein air" for one pengo and soome old clothes…I paint landscapes as well as still lifes in this terrible heat. As a result, I am completely exhausted and have to muster up as much energy as is needed to even write a letter" (Vivan Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2010, p. 83, 85).

"Besides the plein-air painting in blots and the use of bold colours, in Zebegeny in 1932, Amita came face to face with the openness of the landscape, and questions of composition about landscape painting as opposed to interiors" (Keseru Katalin, Amita Sher-Gil, Ernst Museum exhibition catalogue, 2001, p. 55-56).

SHER-GIL and CÉZANNE

Reconciling the academic style of her training with her strong individualism and aversion for naturalism and conventionality, this painting demonstrates Sher-Gil's "...emotional intensity and obsessional love of construction, which had prevailed after Cezanne, and a vivid sense of colour which may have been inborn" (Mulk Raj Anand, Amrita Sher-Gil, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, p. 8).

According to Sher-Gil, Paul Cézanne inspired her beyond all others, and here, her admiration for the 'substance' that she believed Post Impressionist artists like Cézanne and Paul Gauguin had 'brought back' to painting following Impressionism, is evident. In Paris, Sher-Gil "...sought to learn the lesson of Cezanne: that by painting still life pictures and landscapes, in which one had to concentrate on objects with definite structures, one is able to realise the substance of things in terms of paint and canvas. And she understood his emphasis on the intimate relation between form and colour in nature, on the necessity of design, not as a thing in itself but as a synthesis of colours and structures in three-dimensional space" (Ibid., p. 9).

It is Cézanne and Gauguin, "...more than any others, who now determined her style and out of her responses to their pictures came a manner which was firmly and decisively her own" (W.G. Archer, India and Modern Art, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1959, p. 85).

Declared one of India's nine 'National Art Treasure' artists by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1972, the work of Amrita Sher-Gil is not allowed to be exported from India. Only four paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil have ever come up for public auction, and of these, the last one to be available to collectors outside India was offered more than a decade ago. Additionally, of the four, only one represents the artist's early years in Europe. In March 2006, Sher-Gil's 'Village Group' (1938), was sold for Rs. 6.9 crores (US$ 1.55 million), setting a record for any modern Indian painting sold in the country at the time. These facts, coupled with the knowledge that of the artist's 172 documented paintings, 95 are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, and two more in institutional collections in Chandigarh and Lahore, make this one of the only opportunities for collectors of modern Indian art to acquire a work by one of the most important Indian artists and pioneers of Indian modernism.

Unfortunately, Sher-Gil's career was unexpectedly cut short when she died of a sudden haemorrhage in 1941 at the age of 28, following a move to Lahore. The artist, however, will always live on through her body of work, which, although limited, has had a seminal influence on a number of modern and contemporary Indian artists over the last seven decades.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site