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Impressions - Room 2: Return to India

Return to India

Melancholy

Amrita Sher-Gil, Hill Women. Oil on canvas - Collection Vivian and Navina Sundaram, Neu Delhi © Copyright the artist: Amrita Sher-Gil

'I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India', Sher-Gil wrote, 'feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter.' In 1934 the family left Paris to move to Shimla, in the western Himalayas. Sher-Gil painted intensively and travelled widely, keen to observe and represent Indian villagers and their way of life.

With Three Girls (1935), she began to move away from the academic, realist style of painting in which she was schooled, and towards a flatter, more modern composition. It depicts three young women on the threshold of adulthood and marriage, their hapless expressions indicating the artist's empathy for their predicament. In the same year she produced a pair of paintings entitled Hill Men and Hill Women showing groups of Indian villagers. The simplified and
stylised handling of the figures with their sad expressions and the paintings' elongated vertical compositions evoke a sense of dignity as well as pathos. In 1934 Amrita Sher-Gil returned to India. Her first portraits after her return were characterized by a melancholy reminiscent of the intense and vague yearning of the Romantic period. The art historian Deepak Ananth related these portraits to Amrita's situation at the time.

Already in Paris, Amrita realized " in some strange inexplicable way," that her "destiny as a painter" lay in India. Her rich pallet lead her professor to remark that she was "not really in her element in the grey studios of the West." Her return to India became, in fact, a kind of self-discovery voyage for the artist that brought about, both contextually and formally, a completely new orientation:

"It was the vision of a winter in India - desolate, yet strangely beautiful - of endless tracks of luminous yellow-grey land, of dark-bodied, sad-faced, incredibly thin men and women who move silently looking almost like silhouettes and over which an indefinable melancholy reigns. It was different from the India, voluptuous, colorful, sunny and superficial, the India so false to the tempting travel posters that I had expected to see."

Amrita Sher-Gil

In 1936 she met Karl Khandalavala, a collector who encouraged her interest in Indian art, particularly Moghul miniature painting, and the cave paintings and temples carved out of living rock at Ajanta and Ellora. She was deeply influenced by her visits to these sites, describing the frescoes at Ajanta as 'vital, vibrant, subtle and unutterably lovely'. Her paintings of the following few years reflect her growing ambition to create a modern style of painting which was at once quintessentially Indian yet entirely her own. South Indian Villagers Going to Market, which draws both upon the influence of Ajanta and her travels through southern India, is considered by many to be among her most significant works.

Sources: Tate Modern, LondonHaus der Kunst, Munich

Peasant Life and Poverty

Amrita Sher-Gil, Hill Scene, 1938. Oil on canvas - National Gallery of Modern Art, Neu Delhi

Amrita Sher-Gil's characteristic fascination with the color red, the tangible proximity of her figures with their viewers and the dark tones of her backgrounds were all already present in her work, Three Girls (1935).  In  Hill Men und Hill Women  (likewise from 1935)  she discovers her favored motif, peasant life and poverty. Her color scheme is vibrant, glowing and intense. The representation, however, at first seems impersonal because the artist does not approach her motif in a narrative manner, which would emphasize a specific event, but rather allows a kind of tableau vivant to come to life. Her often slightly superimposed figures are posed silently, statically, icon-like. In a more sublime manner than would be the case with an anecdotic representation, the figures allude to the meaningful moment, characteristic of the tableau vivant.

Early Indian Sculpture

The plasticity and inertia of her figures, their grace and the ephemeral contact, with which they graze each other, reveal how strongly Amrita Sher-Gil was impressed by early Indian sculpture. In 1936 she embarked on an extensive voyage through the country that lead her, among other places, to the  Buddhist cliff paintings of Ajanta  (6th - 7th centuries). The  south Indian frescos of Mattancheri  (17th century), as well as the  medieval Moghul and Rajput miniature paintings o f northern India were, for Amrita Sher-Gil, also a kind of artistic revelation. Her correspondence with the art historian  Karl Khandalavala  sheds light on this.

Everyday Realities

After returning from her trip, the artist's figures become more grounded in the everyday realities of their surroundings. The artist's view is no longer characterized by a striving for majestic poses and a romantic exaggeration, but is now more relaxed and distant and, at times, even ironic. During her trip through India Amrita Sher-Gil also came to know of the isolate lifestyle of the women living on feudal estates, the way they passed the time and their, sometimes erotic, desires. She addresses this theme, with its intimate mood, in the works   The Swing, Woman at Bath   and  Woman Resting on Charpoy  (all from 1940).

 

Source: Haus der Kunst, Munich