GLR May-June 2025

ESSAY

Amrita Sher-Gil’s Crossing Worlds N IHARIKA D INKAR

A MRITA SHER-GIL’S striking beauty and moody self-portraits have linked her to Frida Kahlo in the popular imagination. Both are examples of flamboyant painters who were fearlessly bisexual and exploited the medium of self-portraiture to tell the story of their tur bulent lives in the male-dominated art world of the prewar years. Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913. Her mother was a Hungarian opera singer, and her father belonged to an aristo cratic family in Punjab, with the family shuttling between homes in fashionable quarters in Paris and Simla, the summer capital of British India. Sher-Gil’s exposure to the bohemian art world in Paris undoubtedly fostered her uninhibited attitudes toward sexuality. More significantly, however, her paintings register an effusive investment in the corporeal that cumula tively drew modern Indian art into a new and uncharted terrain of a radical feminist art practice. Sher-Gil’s interest in female sexuality is evident from her earliest works that burst upon the scene in the 1930s. In Young Girls (1932) (Figure 1), she wrests the boudoir theme away from its usual voyeuristic fantasies, presenting a casual intimacy between two young girls, one primly dressed in green with beaded necklace and the other disheveled and unkempt. The dark-haired girl in the background was modeled on her sister Indira, and the long-haired blonde in the foreground on her friend, Denise Proutaux, a painter who often modeled for Sher Gil and remained her confidante until her death. Sher-Gil pres ents Proutaux only partially dressed, and there is a latent desire in the stillness between the two girls, each racially distinct and representing, perhaps, Sher-Gil’s own split heritage. Accom modating conventional iconographies of sexuality, she places a bowl of luscious cherries on Indira’s lap, but it tilts away dra matically in a nod to post-Impressionist still lifes that experi mented with flattening perspective. Proutaux’ voluminous lace underskirt is partially covered by a silken blue garment, but she is disconcertingly naked above the waist, her right breast tanta lizingly visible between the strands of her hair. Indira’s gaze locks the two into an intimate bond that holds the world at bay for a moment. There is unsettling mystery that hangs in the air between the two girls, at once commonplace and sensual. A later work, Woman on Charpoy (1940) (Figure 2), trans fers this sense of domestic intimacy to feudal India, specifically Saraya, a small town in northern India based around a sugar mill that Sher-Gil’s relatives owned, and where she and her husband found work when they returned to India after getting married. Here, a woman dressed in a vivid red Punjabi kurta-pajama with vermilion-streaked hair-parting (indicating that she’s married) Niharika Dinkar is an associate professor of art history at Boise State University in Idaho.

lies upon a charpoy, a rustic woven bed common to South Asian homes, as a seated woman fans her. In the lush colors, the di agonal reclining female figure, and the languid air of a hot sum mer afternoon that pervades the scene, Sher-Gil presents the daily rituals of rural life in an idiom that she undoubtedly re worked from Gauguin and his scenes of Tahiti. In a 1940 letter to her friend, the art historian Karl Khan

Fig. 1 (top): Amrita Sher-Gil. Young Girls , 1932. Nat’l Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. Fig. 2 (above): Amrita Sher-Gil, Woman on a Charpoy , 1940. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

May–June 2025

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