Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes

Amrita Sher-Gil was an eminent Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century" and a "pioneer" in modern Indian art. Drawn towards painting since a young age, Sher-Gil started getting formal lessons in the art, at the age of eight. She first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her oil painting titled Young Girls .

Sher-Gil traveled throughout her life to various countries including Turkey, France, and India, deriving heavily from precolonial Indian art styles and its current culture. Sher-Gil is considered an important painter of 20th-century India, whose legacy stands on a level with that of the pioneers from the Bengal Renaissance. She was also an avid reader and a pianist. Sher-Gil's paintings are among the most expensive by Indian women painters today, although few acknowledged her work when she was alive. Wikipedia  

✵ 30. January 1913 – 5. December 1941
Amrita Sher-Gil photo
Amrita Sher-Gil: 22   quotes 2   likes

Famous Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes

“…was to interpret the life of Indians and particularly the poor Indians, pictorially.”

Proclamation of her mission when she painted "The Beggars and Woman with Sunflower".
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“These little compositions are the expression of my happiness and that is why perhaps I am particularly fond of them.”

On Her paintings from January to May 1938 done at Saraya including Elephants Bathing.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes about art

“I was positively stunned and have straight away become a votary of Mathura art to the exclusion of all the other and later schools.”

At Mathura where she saw Kushan sculpture for the first time and she proclaimed.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“It is dreadful to think of Paris in German hands but what preoccupies me still more is what is going to happen to modern French art and the younger artists.”

In June 1938 Amrita and her husband fled from Fascist dominated Hungary.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes

“The Brahmacharis as the most difficult thing she had ever done…. don't you think I have learnt something from Indian painting?…I don't know whether it is a passing phase or a durable change in my outlook but I see in a more detached manner, more ironically than I have ever done.”

In a latter to Karl Khandalavala in 1937 after she had done three paintings on south Indian villagers - The Bride's Toilet, The Brahmacharis, and South Indian Villagers going to Market.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me.”

When Amrita returned to India because her experience in a metropolis, after the initial excitement had died down.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“Rose water and raw spirit…weird amalgam of the bearded star gazer and the red haired pianist pounding away at her keyboard.”

Malcolm Muggeridge who had an serious affair with her in The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-1947, page=46

“An Indian with a measure of European blood, she returned to India to shed her acquired skin…. She saw her country with new vision and has left a legacy of pictures simple and grand…as a tribute to the Indian countryside and its people.”

Maic Casey in [Mitter, Partha, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922-1947, http://books.google.com/books?id=krdWkzVLSbkC&pg=PA236, 2007, Reaktion Books, 978-1-86189-318-5, 45]

“At stake was not only a serious and viable artistic career as a woman, but the development of a subjectivity that was being defined through the self-portrait. conscious of being both muse and maker, Sher-Gil took on the position of artist and object with a double consciousness of being both.”

Above two quotes by art historian Rakhee Balaram in the self in making AMRITA SHER-GIL, 7 December 2013, Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts. http://knma.in/exhibition/self-making-amrita-sher-gil-0.,

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