Amrita's Allure

An ambitious exhibition in Germany focuses on Amrita Sher-Gil's brief but blazing life.

Amrita Sher-Gil, the artist, died quite mysteriously in her flat in Lahore on December 5, 1941 a few weeks short of her 29th birthday. She had taken ill, she told a friend who visited her, after eating a pakora.

Several doctors examined her as her condition deteriorated rapidly, including her husband Victor Egan, who ran a clinic on the ground floor.

The cause of Sher-Gil's sudden and untimely death has been the subject of rumour and speculation ever since: was it a botched abortion? A complication arising from recurrent syphilis for which she was once treated? Or merely a dangerous case of food poisoning? The unanswered questions have only contributed to her steadily growing cult.

Sixty-five years later, the fascination for Amrita Sher-Gil's life and art has acquired a dazzling international dimension. The largest retrospective of Sher-Gil's art ever seen opened at the prestigious Haus der Kunst (House of Art) museum in Munich on October 2, a vast building from Hitler's time with soaring halls, echoing galleries and severe colonnaded verandahs.

"Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist's Family in the 20th Century", as the three-month long show is called, is an exhibition so ambitious in design and comprehensive in scope that it aims to elevate Sher-Gil to the status of iconic women artists of the 20th century, on par with Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keefe.

Outside a substantial holding in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi that her family bequeathed to the nation, the remainder of Sher-Gil's legacy remains unseen. It is mostly held by members of her family in India and Hungary. How much could a 28-year-old have left, anyway? A medium-sized canvas titled "Village Scene" came up at auction in Delhi last spring and fetched Rs 6.9 crore.

What is unique about the Munich show is to see so much of the artist's oeuvre "" an incandescent compressed life in art "" in all its uninhibited glory.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the two Tate Museums in London, was one of the shrewd early arrivals to buttonhole minister of tourism and culture Ambika Soni. His assignment? To bid for an abridged version of the Sher-Gil show in Germany for the Tate Modern in 2007.

"In an age of art celebrities Amrita Sher-Gil is the first celebrated artist of modern India. The facts of her extraordinary life and work must be made accessible to the world," he told me.

Amrita's nephew, the artist Vivan Sundaram, has lent several of Amrita's rarely-before-seen master works from his personal collection, among them "Hill Men" and "Hill Women", painted in Simla in 1935 after her return from Europe, the complex group picture "South Indian Villagers Going to the Market" inspired by her sojourn to Ajanta and Ellora, the Gauguin-themed nude "Self-Portrait as Tahitian", and her bold nude study "Two Girls" with its strong lesbian overtones.

"It is the first time that such a large body of her works has been presented and never before in India. The fact is that a dynamic institution like the Haus der Kunst in Germany will bring in a lot of museum curators, art historians and feminists," says Sundaram.

Altogether 48 of Sher-Gil's works are on display, including 37 from the National Gallery of Modern Art's collection in New Delhi.

The art is bolstered by an exhaustive catalogue, in German and English, introduced by the Paris-based art historian Deepak Ananth and a 36-minute documentary Amrita Sher-Gil: A Family Album presented by her niece Navina Sundaram, a well-know broadcaster and television producer who has lived in Germany for nearly 40 years. But these are just two central strands in the many-layered Munich show.

A search for unusual subjects and a desire to explore the "multiple modernities" of the 20th century, outside the self-contained ambit of the Western world view, led the museum's director Chris Dercon to pluck a bold theme out of India. "There is a rediscovery of Indian literature because of the Frankfurt Book Fair. So why not a rediscovery of modern Indian art?" asks Dercon.

One of an energetic and original bunch of Western museum curators who are re-connecting the art world in new ways, Dercon steps beyond Amrita Sher-Gil's brief but blazing trajectory to show works by three generations of Indian artists from the same family. It is an audacious attempt at putting together "a well-researched art show...that can rewrite art history".

Until now, it was almost unknown that Amrita's father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a Sikh aristocrat who married the Hungarian pianist and singer Marie Antoinette Gottesmann in Lahore in 1912, was a pioneer of early photography in India.

Umrao Singh took up the camera in 1890 and left behind an archive of several hundred images, mainly carefully composed portraits of his wife, two daughters and himself, to rival the works of Raja Lala Deen Dayal and Bourne & Shepherd.

For art historians like Yashodhara Dalmia, whose biography of Sher-Gil published in March has become one of the year's unexpected bestsellers (it is currently in its third hardback reprint) Umrao Singh's photographs are the biggest surprise of the exhibition.

"Unlike the genre and ethnographic studies of Raja Deen Dayal, these are highly stylised and individual portraits. They are a considerable contribution to early Indian photography. Umrao Singh was a scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, an avowed vegetarian and yoga practitioner, a sort of reclusive Tolstoyan figure. Yet he was also an engaged husband and father whose family portraits open up the private world of a remarkable Indo-European family."

Like constructing a gigantic triptych or a musical composition with distinct but inter-connected movements, Amrita Sher-Gil's art and memorabilia form the centre-piece at Munich.

Curator Chris Dercon fills three large first-floor halls of the Haus der Kunst with Umrao Singh's photographs forming one flank and her nephew Vivan Sundaram's artworks the other.

Moving from one space to the next, the viewer is gripped by the protean power of three generations of artists spanning two continents "" an Indo-European century "" long before the chimera of globalisation came into view. Walking through I had the feeling, musically speaking, of familiarity and surprise, awe and delight, as one may encounter in hearing enthralling new improvisations from an established gharana.

The 63-year-old Vivan Sundaram is both artist and social activist. He studied at the Slade School in London but moved away from the stuff of conventional canvas and paint to enter the world of mixed media and installation art in the 1980s. His black-and-white digitally manipulated images, combining Umrao Singh and Amrita's works and titled "Retake of the Sher-Gil Archive", are most unsettling of all.

The brazen dream-like abandon of Amrita lying naked on a beach with a windmill overhead, posing in decorous chiffon in an up-to-date Art Deco drawing room or swimming with elephants in a palm-fringed Kerala lagoon, are startling for being forays into family history and post-colonial truth-telling "" visually subversive Subaltern Studies.

Sundaram's compositions are also compelling because they simultaneously set up and undermine the nostalgia associated with an inter-War and inter-racial family. The clash of civilisations is here but suffused with an erotic charge. Both Indian and Western viewers are liable to ask: so what was really going on? Do conventional accounts of history tell us the whole story?

Amrita Sher-Gil clearly perceived the problems of her identity and image in her lifetime though she sometimes expressed it in bursts of rhetorical bombast.

"Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others. India belongs only to me," she declared in 1938. She was 25, done with the Ecole des Beaux Arts (where she had been admitted, something of a child prodigy, at 16) and honours won at the Grand Salon in Paris.

A letter to her parents, dated Budapest 1934, is a personal manifesto; she argues why India matters more than anything else for her artistic development: "Our long stay in Europe has aided me to discover India...A fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musee Guimet is worth more than the Renaissance!" Later, she said her ambition was to interpret "the life of the Indian poor".

Amrita's seven-year journey in India was both intense and condensed. Swiftly, she set about reinventing her image and her art, shedding her Paris clothes for bright saris and working at manic speed to capture forms and colours in a "new technique...that would be fundamentally Indian in spirit."

Moving restlessly between family homes in Punjab, Simla and eastern UP, travelling to Bombay, Hyderabad and Lahore for her shows and further afield to visit sites of antiquity, sensational Miss Sher-Gil went everywhere. Opinionated, outspoken, impetuous and scandalous, the love affair between Amrita and India was instant and mutual.

Intellectuals, critics and cafe society deadbeats came under her spell. "Such vigour, such daring, such originality," gasped Sarojini Naidu. Jawaharlal Nehru held on to a photograph of hers.

Malcolm Muggeridge, the English journalist with whom she had a well-documented liasion, noted "the animal intensity of her concentration" as he sat for a portrait. "It was this animality which she somehow transferred to the colours as she mixed them and splashed them on her canvas."

But her art sold poorly in her lifetime and she had trouble eking out a living. The eminent Bombay jurist and art collector Karl Khandalavala, an early promoter of Amrita's, later explained why. "Her sales might have been better had she been a little less tactless...Miss Sher-Gil had no charm, personal or otherwise, when it came to a discussion on art, and no business ability of any sort."

In 1938, despite serious parental objections, she returned to Budapest to marry her first cousin Victor Egan. He was an impoverished doctor but the two had been exceptionally close since childhood.

The threat of war (her Hungarian family was Jewish) drove the couple back to India where family dissentions and her husband's need to find employment took them to a remote corner of UP. It was here that she produced her most powerful last works: "The Ancient Storyteller", "Woman Resting on a Charpoy" and "The Bride". But the frustrations of marriage, loneliness and shortage of money were early signs of the approaching denouement.

Sher-Gil was as prolific a letter-writer as she was a painter "" her words pour forth, acutely observant like her brush strokes. Unfortunately, not too many letters survive. (Her mother, a depressive who eventually committed suicide, burnt a large number.)

Two messages however "" one to her sister, the other to her husband "" convey the sense of melancholy and foreboding that gripped her: "...how often do I not think of the tomorrow and the many, many tomorrows yet to come with dread...I wonder then how it will be possible to fill up this unending series of voids...in the long, seemingly interminable, years to come." And to Victor Egan she said: "I have to work hard, I have to work fast, because my time is very short."

The life and work of all artists is open to re-interpretation "" there is even a market nowadays for what Sher-Gil wore, as Suneet Verma, the fashion designer discovered in New Delhi when he recently launched a collection based on her sartorial style. What drives Amrita's allure, though, is that she has become all things to all people ""feminist, fashion plate, nationalist, modernist and exhibitionist.

"Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist's Family in the 20th Century" is on at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, until January 7, 2007. It is expected to transfer to the Tate Modern, London, later next year.