Amrita Sher-Gil’s Crossing Worlds

Amrita 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 turbulent 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 aristocratic 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 cumulatively drew modern Indian art into a new and uncharted terrain of a radical feminist art practice.