London
Amrita Sher-Gil & Vivan Sundaram
Tate Modern

Born in Budapest in 1913 to the photographer Umrao Singh Sher-Gil and his Hungarian wife, Amrita Sher-Gil led a short, fantastic life that traced the arc between World Wars I and II. Organized by Tate curator Emma Dexter, this is the first major exhibition to bring together painting from Sher-Gil’s days in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts with her final work in India. Interspersed throughout are digital photomontages by her nephew, Vivan Sundaram, today one of India’s most highly regarded artists. Sundaram pored through the family archive, digitally mixing intimate snapshots with his grandfather’s studio and documentary images to recreate his family’s cosmopolitan journey between bohemian Europe and Anglo-Indian colonial society. Sher-Gil’s paintings and Sundaram’s montages complement each other, in some cases showing different versions of the same scenes.

In the first two galleries, Sher-Gil’s early paintings display her training in modernist figurative techniques, like those of Gauguin. In Paris, she crafted large, sensual figure studies of female models, their bodies centered in the picture with a focus on their contours and vividly colored details, like scarves or flowers. This exhibition also highlights Sher-Gil’s interest in Suzanne Valadon, the most recognized female painter of her generation, whose nudes defied the conventions set by her male counterparts. Sher-Gil’s Young Girls (1932), a double portrait of her sister Indira and a friend, reflects this influence by placing the women against a dark and seedy background. Their bodies are muscularly defined and their poses suggest a meeting of purpose, rather than of circumstance. This painting was completed just before Sher-Gil moved to her family’s compound in Shimla (now in Pakistan) in 1934.

During a major touring exhibition through India, Sher-Gil met the art critic and collector Karl Khandalavala. He became her chief supporter, encouraging her to visit historic sites like Ajanta and Ellora. Her correspondence to him about her sketches of rural people demonstrates her rejection of the faux-Primitivism of Paris. In the center of the Tate exhibition Hill Women (1935) and Hill Scene (1938) are smaller compositions with condensed pictorial space. The colors are more subdued and finely focused, indicating a growing contact with miniature painting. Hungarian Village Market (1939), which may have been a staged tableau, is similarly compact. In it, the abstracted figures are tightly arranged into a crowd scene. The building in the background is monumental, an imposing blanket of white separating the dark sky from the crowd. This painting suggests what Sher-Gil might have done with the representation of space had she had more time, just as her work was becoming more psychologically complex.

Following her mysterious death in Lahore in 1942, Sher-Gil’s paintings gained national prominence in India. Curator Dexter’s effort to show the depth of the artist’s skill will no doubt bring more attention to Sher-Gil’s work and its relationship to modernist painting between the wars.

- Courtney J. Martin