Died too young, much too young, but one can only imagine with a racing heart what it would be, to breathe, in presence of such a blazing character.
She was always in ebullition, and if her art would not be manifested and realized from her entrails, she started to shrink and die.
Just like her marriage to her cousin Victor, who we are told, did not really understand her passion for her Art.
She needed this elusive stability to explore and explode, which never really came, and could in fact be, why her short disappearance by the age of 28, led to such stellar works, almost like a latent premonition of a short life, of the Haldi grinders, the Elephant Passage, works of great artistry, exploring form, shadow, and ‘indian-ness’, and women and her place in patriarchal India.
Sher-Gil is the reverse of what conservative traditions often desires and insists of us, from us, a stable family life, a career, amassing property and assets, she flouted all, in search of her Art.
Educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, she swayed between Hungary and India, and finally realized that: ‘Picasso, Monet, they had belonged to Europe, she, Amrita, belonged to India’, and when this realization had dawned, then emerged Amrita!
Her Haldi Grinders sans bourgeois sentimentality, released Indian Art to where it truly belonged, with and amongst the people, and in the true pastoral images of India.
Sher-Gil always said she found the Bengal renaissance art ‘cramping, crippling on the soul’, and it was only in the older perennial images of millennial India, Ajanta, Khajoraho, that she felt she had discovered the regenerative power of Art.
Those artists, she felt, must have been supremely unabashedly confident, without a trace of guilt, nor doubt, a supreme confidence which she transferred to her own work, the ‘Bride`s Toilet’, which she called her greatest work.
Bride`s toilet was intent on simplicity, embracing the regions local color, endlessly reworking it until she found the ‘form’. A triumph of form !
Amrita the trail blazer….
She was always in ebullition, and if her art would not be manifested and realized from her entrails, she started to shrink and die.
Just like her marriage to her cousin Victor, who we are told, did not really understand her passion for her Art.
She needed this elusive stability to explore and explode, which never really came, and could in fact be, why her short disappearance by the age of 28, led to such stellar works, almost like a latent premonition of a short life, of the Haldi grinders, the Elephant Passage, works of great artistry, exploring form, shadow, and ‘indian-ness’, and women and her place in patriarchal India.
Sher-Gil is the reverse of what conservative traditions often desires and insists of us, from us, a stable family life, a career, amassing property and assets, she flouted all, in search of her Art.
Educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, she swayed between Hungary and India, and finally realized that: ‘Picasso, Monet, they had belonged to Europe, she, Amrita, belonged to India’, and when this realization had dawned, then emerged Amrita!
Her Haldi Grinders sans bourgeois sentimentality, released Indian Art to where it truly belonged, with and amongst the people, and in the true pastoral images of India.
Sher-Gil always said she found the Bengal renaissance art ‘cramping, crippling on the soul’, and it was only in the older perennial images of millennial India, Ajanta, Khajoraho, that she felt she had discovered the regenerative power of Art.
Those artists, she felt, must have been supremely unabashedly confident, without a trace of guilt, nor doubt, a supreme confidence which she transferred to her own work, the ‘Bride`s Toilet’, which she called her greatest work.
Bride`s toilet was intent on simplicity, embracing the regions local color, endlessly reworking it until she found the ‘form’. A triumph of form !
Amrita the trail blazer….
A propos de l'auteur : Rattan Gujadhur left Mauritius for higher studies in the US in 1999. He has practiced in the Pharma and Biotech world for over 29 years and is a Dr in Chemistry. He remains deeply in love with Mauritius and has published reminiscences of Mauritius via a poetry collection and a novel
