The NGMA's retrospective on Amrita Sher Gil has its flaws, but the artist shines through, regardless. Sher Gil burnt bright in her 28 years, painting prolifically, living fashionably and scandalously, winning admirers, awards and critics, denouncing the 'cheap sentimentality' that she felt was the stock-in-trade of too many of her Indian peers, dying quickly and restlessly. She was equal parts society swan and serious artist, sparkling and melancholic, bold and self-conscious. She inhabited a uniquely personal intersection between the European and the Indian, and she interpreted both Indian and European Modernism in that light.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition allows a viewer to map the evolution of the artist's style. The first section on the ground floor consists of portraits, nude studies and some still lifes painted during the early 1930s. These are paintings bristling with energy, with thick brush strokes adding up to portray subjects as robust, sitting solid and square with expressions that are challenging, if not defiant. The feminine body is everywhere strong, unyielding, almost muscular. Although these are all different people, there is a bit of a sameness to them, as if the artist's personality had held greater sway during the sitting than the subject's.
It is in the second section that her style begins to visibly mature. Sher Gil describes herself as an explorer of the sensuality of the line, and it is here that the sensuality comes into play most prominently. The portraits are more nuanced, the brush strokes less urgent, the people behind the painting make themselves a little more felt - whether coquettish, weary, clever or curious. There are many, many women here and they are vital - long limbed, large eyed, lush lipped. When nude, their bodies are painted with a matter of factness that renders their nudity almost besides the point and lets their personalities manifest.
And of course there are many self-portraits of Sher Gil herself, painted at different times and in different moods - Amrita undressed (or undressing), Amrita in furs, laughing, languorous. Two of these, done in an almost Impressionist style, are the ones that I liked best - breezy and both of them showing her in her element, at work. There's also a small clutch of paintings made in Hungary - flat and almost cubist in their dimensions and interesting as a marked departure from her recognizably animated style.
The third and last section is the one in which Sher Gil's craft becomes most refined, with the influence of Indian miniature painting and the frescoes and sculptures of Ajanta and Ellora becoming clearer. This is where the paintings become stylized, the lines fine, the use of space much, much cleverer, so much so that some of the oil paintings here have the quality of water-colours. Although a few of these paintings have a somber Gauginesque quality, most of them are sensitive and delicate portrayals of village life and (mostly) village women that play with perspective, pulling planes out and folding them back in. Although the iconic "Three Girls," "Brahmacharis" and "The Bride's Toilet" loom large, the images I still have with me are those of "Village Girls," "The Swing," "Ancient Storytellers" and "Elephants." All four are simultaneously angular but soft, flat but textured, full of that indefinable quality of mood. Sher Gil had said that she wanted to transcend the 'merely sentimental' with these paintings, and while there is romance here there is also dignity.
Who knows what else this tempestuous, opinionated and polarizing artist would have done in the course of a longer career? She was flamboyant, she was politically incorrect, she was singular in times when it would have been much more convenient not to have been. Amrita Sher Gil was so entirely alive that she was never exactly a mystery. It's odd, but also true, that this is precisely what makes her all the more compelling.
No comments:
Post a Comment