Amrita Sher-Gil : An Indian Artist Family of the Twentieth Century

Contents: Foreword/Rajeev Lochan. 2. Introduction/Nicholas Serota. 3. An unfinished project/Deepak Ananth. Plates: Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Amrita Sher-Gil, Vivan Sundaram. Chronology.

"Amrita Sher-Gil proved to be a prodigious artist in her short but experiential life. The extraordinary extent and variety of her subjects demonstrate the versatility and range of her interests, and reveal her sensitivity to the aesthetic, social, psychological and emotional aspects of existence. In many ways, her images encapsulate the characteristics of our times, notably in her constant experimentation to discover the relevance of modernism through her engagement with Indian reality.

Amrita’s life was filled with several provocative contradictions that are reflected in the thematic and pictorial content of her work. Her self-consciousness and awareness are best evidenced in the innumerable letters she wrote, which are thought-provoking and contemplative. Her paintings exhibit the east-west dilemma in pictorial terms, and demonstrate how her creative genius grasped the Indian pictorial tradition and environment to create a very personalized ethos. They show how diverse cultural identities allow the possibility of intermingling, perhaps because of the potential and inherent quality of change they have to offer.

Amrita’s was an inquisitive mind – intensely passionate, introspective and always self-evaluating in a constant search to transcend the human condition through her creations. She consciously tried to assimilate her understanding of the west and interweave it with strains of her indigenous inheritance, in an artistic process of absorbing the collective consciousness of the people around her people whom she chose to react to, and also paint."