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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 quotes2 likes

Famous Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes

“In "Toward a Development of a Cosmopolitan Aesthetic"”

Amrita Sher-Gil

“I am always in love, but unfortunately for the party concerned, I fall out of love or rather fall in love with someone else before any damage can be done.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

About her love life
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

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

Amrita Sher-Gil

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.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

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

“Amrita Sher-Gill: Art and Life: A Reader (page xvii)”

Amrita Sher-Gil

“She was very fair and there was an expression of weariness in the lovely liquid dark eyes. Her little finely curved and red hued lips seemed like drooping rosebuds and were sealed as if it were in silence eternal…. she seemed as if she guessed the cruel fate which had been meted out for her by the Rani and Rajah and her other rich but distant relations in whose hands she seemed a helpless toy.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

At the age of 12, her description of a bride at an Indian wedding.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes about art

“Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musee Guimet is worth more than a whole Renaissance.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

In 1934 on her new art form
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“I shall in future be obliged to resign myself to exhibiting them (her paintings) merely at the Grand Salon, Paris, of which I happen to be an Associate and the Salon de Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art, and to which I have been invited to participate in the past, a distinction I may add that few can boast of.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

Statement made when her painting was rejected by the Simla Fine Arts Society in 1935.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“Traditions that were once vital, sincere and splendid and which are now merely empty formulae, [nor to imitate fifth rate western art slavishly] break away from both and produce something vital, connected with the soil, something essentially Indian.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita to her contemporary painters.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

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

Amrita Sher-Gil

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

“I was positively stunned and have straightaway become a votary of Mathura art to the exclusion of all the other and later schools. I had some of the things in reproductions but never dreamt they were so magnificent. With the possible exception of Mahabalipuram I don’t think I have seen anything in Indian sculpture that I liked so much.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

In [Dalmia, Yashodhara, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, http://books.google.com/books?id=KmMctE3wAgIC&pg=PT152, 15 January 2013, Penguin Books Limited, 978-81-8475-921-1, 152–]
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.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

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.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

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.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

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

“The life of Indians, particularly the poor, pictorially…. with a new technique, my own technique…and this technique though not technically Indian, in the traditional sense of the word, will yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

Her decision after coming to India in 1935.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“Revelations. Ellora magnificent. Ajanta curiously subtle and fascinating-I have for the first time since my return to India learnt something from somebody else's work.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

Her surprised reaction on seeing art work in Ellora and Ajanta
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

“Towards the end of 1933 I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

In 1933, when she wanted to return to India.
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.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

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.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

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]

“Art in India was never the same after her comet like appearance. There are only a few moments in the history of art which pinpoint a new departure, a new direction. Such a moment in the history of modern Indian art was the appearance in the mid-thirties of Amrita Sher-Gil with whose paintings contemporary paintnig in India took shape and demonstrated the possibility of a contemporary style and expression that were, at the same time, of the soil and in direct continuation of the great national past.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

Ruby Von Leiden in amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), 7 December 2013, Learnpunjabi.org http://www.learnpunjabi.org/eos/AMRITA%20SHER-GIL%20%281913-1941%29.html,

“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.”

Amrita Sher-Gil

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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