To keep oneself together

Amrita Sher-Gil has often been compared to Frida Kahlo, in that both women emerged on the art firmament at a time when male artists held sway exclusively. They both had colourful personal lives and the aura of possessing an ambiguous sexuality. Both women suffered illnesses which finally consumed their lives and the intense relationship they shared with their work.

Kahlo, however, through her own artistic moorings and her life-defining relationship with Mexican painter Diego Riviera, was decidedly Mexican and strove to establish Mexican art in the Western world. Sher-Gil, on the other hand, alternated all her life between her European upbringing due to her Hungarian mother, and her later life in India, where she gained her fame.

Arguably, the pivotal task of taking on the challenge of writing a biography of someone like Amrita Sher-Gil, whose fame as an artist almost equalled the notoriety that her unconventional life brought her, would be to understand the conflict in her personality, the conflict of her very being, in a sense. The cleavage not just between her Hungarian and Indian roots, but in the essence of her own personality. Between her instinctive understanding of life (as reflected in her paintings) and the poseur who played games with lovers (as Malcolm Muggeridge, one of her many lovers, claims).

Dalmia's book succeeds in laying bare some of these conflicts, which are a kind of coda to Sher-Gil's paintings, to the extent that this can realistically be achieved given the scarcity of informational resources on relevant details of her life.

The most interesting part of the book, however, is the latter half. Here, more than anywhere else in the book, Sher-Gil's own voice speaks above that of others in explaining her work and the difficulties of the artistic life that she had chosen.

Much has been written about Sher-Gil's privileged upbringing, French art school, European holidays and numerous love affairs. Dalmia's book, fortunately, does not dwell at length on these well-known facts of Sher-Gil's life. What we read is, surprisingly, the near poverty-stricken existence that she led after her marriage to Victor Egan, her doctor cousin.

Her determination to go on painting, despite occasional bouts of depression, having to share a home with a nearly a dozen relatives at a family-owned sugar mill in Uttar Pradesh's heartland Saraya. No parties and art house intrigues to tickle one's creative juices, and yet Sher-Gil paints at a prolific rate in the rural backwaters. Worrying as much about the cost of paint and canvas as of linen and crockery.

One also gets to see the empathy and compassion which Amrita Sher-Gil starts to experience for her rural subjects. The painting Woman Resting on a Charpoy is a masterpiece in conveying Sher-Gil's ability to communicate sexuality and the suffocating limits placed on the woman.

Dalmia could perhaps have dwelt a little more on Sher-Gil's relationship with her mother, Marie Antoinette, and her sister, Indira. It is Indira who is one of the models for one of her earliest works, Two Girls, which she painted at the age of 19, and their relationship with each other""and with a dominating mother""is not fully explored.

Many of Sher-Gil's internal conflicts seem directly attributable to the ambitious and disturbed Marie Antoinette. That Sher-Gil's mother committed suicide shortly after her death is another reason to look beneath the surface of this relationship for a closer understanding of Sher-Gil's life.

Much has been made of the fact that this biography has come out at a time when Sher-Gil's Village Scene has hit newspaper headlines with an auction value of Rs 6.9 crore. Contrast this to the fact that in her own lifetime, Sher-Gil did not manage to sell a single painting. What this merely emphasises is the fact that whether her art has sold or not has always been a matter of fascination for people in India, even if the recent price paid for the painting is portrayed as just another part of a larger interest in Indian art.

In all, it is refreshing to find a biography of the painter which goes beyond Sher-Gil the "personality" with her saris, lovers and art salons, and dares to lay bare the fact that she was a conflicted individual at a time when the whole world was struggling to find itself. Seen in that context, it is not difficult to see Sher-Gil for what she was: an artist trying to find her feet.

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AMRITA SHER-GIL
A LIFE

Yashodhara Dalmia
Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 695; Pages: 229