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.
Sher-Gil’s interest in female sexuality is evident from her earliest works that burst upon the scene in the 1930s. In Young Girls (1932) (Figure 1), she wrests the boudoir theme away from its usual voyeuristic fantasies, presenting a casual intimacy between two young girls, one primly dressed in green with beaded necklace and the other disheveled and unkempt. The dark-haired girl in the background was modeled on her sister Indira, and the long-haired blonde in the foreground on her friend, Denise Proutaux, a painter who often modeled for Sher-Gil and remained her confidante until her death. Sher-Gil presents Proutaux only partially dressed, and there is a latent desire in the stillness between the two girls, each racially distinct and representing, perhaps, Sher-Gil’s own split heritage. Accommodating conventional iconographies of sexuality, she places a bowl of luscious cherries on Indira’s lap, but it tilts away dramatically in a nod to post-Impressionist still lifes that experimented with flattening perspective. Proutaux’ voluminous lace underskirt is partially covered by a silken blue garment, but she is disconcertingly naked above the waist, her right breast tantalizingly visible between the strands of her hair. Indira’s gaze locks the two into an intimate bond that holds the world at bay for a moment. There is unsettling mystery that hangs in the air between the two girls, at once commonplace and sensual.
A later work, Woman on Charpoy (1940) (Figure 2), transfers this sense of domestic intimacy to feudal India, specifically Saraya, a small town in northern India based around a sugar mill that Sher-Gil’s relatives owned, and where she and her husband found work when they returned to India after getting married. Here, a woman dressed in a vivid red Punjabi kurta-pajama with vermilion-streaked hair-parting (indicating that she’s married) lies upon a charpoy, a rustic woven bed common to South Asian homes, as a seated woman fans her. In the lush colors, the diagonal reclining female figure, and the languid air of a hot summer afternoon that pervades the scene, Sher-Gil presents the daily rituals of rural life in an idiom that she undoubtedly reworked from Gauguin and his scenes of Tahiti.
In a 1940 letter to her friend, the art historian Karl Khandalavala, Sher-Gil described the painting as “sensual … but not sensual in the effete rather repulsive manner of some of our good Bombay Fine Art exhibitors.” Instead, she dwells upon the colors, describing the charpoy’s posts as “an incandescent red ris[ing]around her like tongues of flame—a fat, dark woman in the background in green is fanning her (ruddy blackish brown tones in the flesh, very attractive).” An everyday practice of care is imbued with a touch of the erotic here, suggested in the careless abandon of the figure in repose, the lassitude of the attendant, and the casual acknowledgement of the woman as a desiring subject.
Sher-Gil had learned painting in Simla as a child and during a short stay in Florence in 1924, but it was in Paris that she came into her own, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with the genre painter Pierre Vaillant. In 1929, she joined the studio with Lucien Simon at the École des Beaux-Arts, where they formed the school of Nouveau Réalisme aligned with communist sympathies, an early iteration of the more famous movement of the 1960s. In those heady years, she was swept into the bohemian artistic circles of the city, taking on multiple lovers, including painter Boris Taslitzky and pianist Edith Lang-Laszlo. She painted three portraits of Taslitzky as well as one of his mother, who later died in a Nazi concentration camp. Taslitzky, in turn, painted a portrait of Sher-Gil, as did Yves Brayer, who portrayed her as an elegant, exotic “Oriental” figure with a sari draped over her head, her dark hair cascading down—based on a photograph taken by her father, Umrao Singh.
As Brayer’s portrayal of her Oriental background suggests, Sher-Gil was able to flaunt her identity as a mixed-race artist in Paris. In her self-portraits and photographs, she drew attention to her Indian origins, often shown draped in a sari, wielding a brush. In 1933, her friend Denise Proutaux wrote an article on Sher-Gil in the French journal Minerva, gushing about her as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess.” Sher-Gil responded jokingly, calling herself a “mysterious little Indian princess who is well on her way to becoming a great painter.” The Hindu princess transformed into a Muslim Sultana in a later account by Proutaux: “The ‘Sultana Scheherazade’ speaks French like a Parisian, but the soft blue sari draped around her heightens her amber and ochre complexion, evocative not of the banks of the Seine, but the strange, distant shores of the Ganga.” In fact, Sher-Gil was neither Hindu nor Muslim, but Sikh. In India, she took to wearing only saris, writing in a 1935 letter: “[F]rom now on I shall only wear saris and Indian dresses. First of all, they are much more beautiful. Secondly, since here in India only Eurics [Eurasians] wear European clothes and as I do not fancy this race and do not want to identify myself with them, I will not wear European clothes any more.”
Sher-Gil was not only cognizant of the exoticization of her identity, but also made ironic comment upon it in her painting titled Self Portrait as Tahitian (Figure 3), which responds to Gauguin’s well-known nudes from French Polynesia. Her transformation into the prototypical primitive here—bare-breasted, brown-skinned, standing rigidly tall with her hair tied into a long pony-tail—is pure masquerade and could not be further removed from the urbane Parisian world she inhabited. And yet, Sher-Gil steps purposefully into this role as Tahitian, her brown skin dappled in hues of umber and coffee, bridging the distance between the Ganga and the South Sea waters of Tahiti, relying, as always, upon the resonances and emotive possibilities of color. While her brown skin enables this impersonation, her posture and the forced simplicity enjoin us to understand that this is role-playing, a conscious act of self-fashioning that looks back to Gauguin and points to her fully embracing her Indianness. She wrote to her friend Karl Khandalavala in 1938: “I don’t think I shall paint at all in Europe. I can only paint in India. Elsewhere, I am not natural, I have no self-confidence. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.”
Sher-Gil’s letters make little reference to her bisexuality, perhaps because her mother burned some of her letters in 1938, an act that left her particularly anguished. In one letter to her mother from 1934, she responds to her mother’s questions about the nature of her relationship with the gifted painter Marie-Louise Chassany (1909–1940), with whom she shared a studio at rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Taslitzky had described Chassany as tall and thin, “like a Giacometti,” and Sher-Gil valued her artistic acumen, being attracted to her odd, reserved mannerisms. But she denied a sexual relationship: “I have never had any sexual relationship with Marie-Louise, and will not have one either.” However, she went on to acknowledge the possibility of a lesbian relationship:
Knowing how unprejudiced, objective and intelligent you are, I am going to be very frank with you. I confess that I also think as you do about the disadvantages of relationships with men. But since I need to relieve my sexuality physically somehow (because I think it is impossible to spiritualise, idealise sexuality completely in art, and channelising it through art for a lifetime is impossible, only a stupid superstition invented for the brainless). So I thought I would start a relationship with a woman when the opportunity arises.
National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
In disassociating her own sexuality from the physicality of painting, Sher-Gil was also responding to the dominant school of anti-colonial painting in India, which adopted “spiritualism” as its defining æsthetic, celebrating figures of the Brahmacharya (celibate asceticism) or chaste goddesses in their work. She dismissed these Bengal School painters as romantics, rejecting their techniques, which dematerialized the body in evocative watercolor washes, as “feeble and emasculating.” Their idealized portraits of chaste women, drawn from mythology and history, held little attraction for Sher-Gil, and she chose instead to document contemporary women and their vital presence in richly textured oils that registered the physicality of the body, including its deprivations. Her painting of Mother India (1935) (Figure 4), for instance, is closer to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936), with the impoverished mother embracing her children as she faces an uncertain future, than to the Bengal school painter Abanindranath Tagore’s Bharat Mata (“Mother India”) of 1906 (Figure 5), which portrayed the mother as an asexual goddess providing succor to the nation.
The closest report of Sher-Gil’s lesbian relationships comes from the research for a film on her by the noted director Kumar Shahani from 1986. Although the film was never completed, interviews with some of her contemporaries in Paris, including Denise Proutaux and Elaine Gergely, describe her relationship with the Hungarian pianist Edith Lang-Laszlo. Laszlo’s younger brother Dombi was a classmate of her cousin, later her husband (as of 1938), Victor Egan, in medical school. According to Gergely, Laszlo and Sher-Gil shared a dramatic tension in their respective relationships with their mothers that attracted them to each other. Marie-Louise Chassany is said to have walked in on them in bed in their studio, and Laszlo was devastated when Sher-Gil moved to India in 1934, continuing to correspond with her. Proutaux pointed to a classic triangle between Laszlo, Gergely, and Sher-Gil, with Gergely wildly jealous of the intimacy of the other two women.
Sher-Gil was not only promiscuous in her romantic liaisons but also careless in her sexual relationships, undergoing risky abortions at least twice, as well as contracting a sexually transmitted disease, most likely from a wealthy suitor, Yusuf Ali Khan, to whom she was engaged briefly in 1931 on the insistence of her mother. Sher-Gil broke off the engagement soon after because, as she complained, he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. She made arrangements to be secretly treated for the venereal disease in Budapest, but it plagued her long after, and there is speculation that her early death, at 28, was linked to her sexual indiscretions. Her casual approach to sex inevitably invited the ire of many in her social circle, including the urbane, sophisticated set that she hung out with in India. One acquaintance, Badruddin Tyabji, spoke for many as he recounted in frustration (in a 1986 letter to Kumar Shahani):
Her zest was inexhaustible. … Her need for sexual encounter was constant. Something went wrong in Paris. She would go to bed with everyone, with no distinction. I found it unbearable. Friendship didn’t depend on sex. She didn’t give a damn. She was determined to live life on her own terms. People were drawn to her, her attraction was so powerful. She got on as well with women. Women were almost enslaved by her, attractive women of the time.
As scandalized as poor Tyabji was by Sher-Gil’s sexual proclivities, he nevertheless touched upon a kernel of truth about Sher-Gil’s core beliefs. Her sexuality was an essential part of her identity, one that she was unapologetic about in her own life, and whose valences she continually sought to explore in her paintings.
Niharika Dinkar is an associate professor of art history at Boise State University in Idaho.
