On Amrita Sher-Gil’s birth anniversary, a closer look at the women in her paintings

Amrita Sher-Gil was one of the first woman artists of part-Indian heritage, who captured through her paintings, the experiences of women from a range of social and economic backgrounds. As a sociologist, with interests in studying social class, marriage, and gender, I remain amazed at her ability to paint from both “emic” (insider) and “etic” (outsider) perspectives, if you will.

Her art works can be traced in two phases: the early 1930s Western influence, when she was in Paris, and her later works on Indian realities. The former body of work was heavily influenced by Post-Impressionist art, as evident in the brush strokes, richness of colours, and focus on bringing out nuances of still and ordinary life in her paintings including Dressing Table (1931), Hungarian Gypsy Girl (1932), Young Girls (1932).

A striking aspect of most of these paintings was that they were based on the ordinariness of her social and familial life; an emic perspective in that, as she painted her friends (Boris Tachlitzky, Marie Louise Chassany), family, and fellow-students of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. In fact, Young Girls (1932), which gave her much recognition and a gold medal and entry into the Grand Salon of Paris, is a painting of herself and her younger sister, Indira.

She also painted a series of self-portraits with the intention of capturing her sociable and charming self, paying special attention to her colourful attires and jewellery. Some of these self-portraits also had a deliberate presentation of a quintessential bourgeoisie femme, with glistening pearls, a soft gaze, and an air of arrogance.

It seems that these paintings were influenced by works of Edward Degas and James Tissot (or Jacques Joseph Tissot), also artists of the Paris circle, who portrayed the everyday life of bourgeoisie women. Degas, who is more famously known for his bronze sculptures and paintings of dancing girls, uniquely captured bourgeoisie women in public spaces, as opposed to the practice of painting them in their salons, in his works In a Café (c. 1876) and Mary Cassatt at the Louvre I (1880).

It was Tissot, more than Degas, who captured the glamorous bourgeoisie life by painting women in their full swing and charm, fashionably dressed for soirées or walks in parks, in works including On the Thames (c 1874), The Political Lady (1885), and The Ball (1880). In a similar vein, Sher-Gil too portrayed bourgeoisie women, at times turning the gaze onto herself and at other times to her friends and family, capturing the dynamism of luxury, beauty, pride, and self-assurance.

Her other body of work was nude paintings (self and models), which significantly reveals how she celebrated and was also curious of the female body and its expressions. It is in fact alluded that she had homosexual relations (with her friend Marie Louise Chassanay). Irrespective, her intimacy and self-awareness of the female body and emotions, add to the beauty of her latter works on Indian women.

Nostalgic and conflicted about her Hungarian and Indian heritage, Sher-Gil decided to move back to India in 1934, which lead to her developing another distinctive approach to her art. To begin with, when in India, she was inspired by the Bengal School of Art, in particular works of Abindranath and Rabindranath Tagore.

With this, not only did her style of painting undergo changes, with respect to brush strokes and use of colour, the subjects of her paintings as well as the emotions she captured too were different now. As she moved to a village close to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, with her husband, Viktor Egan, she now captured the rural life of India; this time lending an outsider’s perspective to her art.

While her previous paintings were a peek into the ostentatious ordinariness of the European bourgeoisie, she now focussed on depicting the slow-paced everyday rural life, particularly of women.

This change in perspective was also evident in her use of colours and deliberate technique of not accentuating the female body (as she had done previously). For instance, in Three Girls (1935), Two Women (1936), Resting (1940), Woman on Charpai (1938) each woman is painted in a single colour, in a way that her dupatta (scarf) covers her body to add a sense of homogeneity to her being.

This is to say, in a break from her previous techniques of depictions, she takes focus away from the body, and instead accentuates the female form and its expressions by use of bright single colours, to bring attention to themes of melancholy and monotony in women’s lives.

These women are not the effervescent, sociable women of European society that she painted previously. Rather, they are depicted in their everyday existence, sitting in the courtyard or bathroom, or laying on a cot after a day of drudgerous work, either with a contemplative gaze, or with an expression of loneliness yet a feeling of togetherness in female friendships and relations, or as comfortably experiencing the contesting sentiments of acceptance and desire.

Sher Gil’s two phases of works have given expression to the myriad experiences and agencies of women from across social, economic and cultural strata. She has captured women’s pride and melancholy, effervescence and monotony, luxury and ordinariness, self-assurance and contemplation, whilst being on her own path of self-discovery, traveling from Hungary to France to India, and eventually laying to rest in Pakistan.

Parul Bhandari is Associate Professor of Sociology at Jindal Global Business School, OP Jindal Global University.