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1913–1941 Hungary
Amrita Sher-Gil (January 30, 1913 – December 5, 1941), an eminent Indian painter, was the daughter of Sardar Umrao Singh Shergil and Antoinette, a Hungarian lady. Her first notable work was "Young Girls", which made her an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933; she was the youngest ever Asian to receive this recognition.
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It is dreadful to think of Paris in German hands but what preoccupies me still more is what is going to happen to modern French art and the younger artists.
These little compositions are the expression of my happiness and that is why perhaps I am particularly fond of them.
Revelations. Ellora magnificent. Ajanta curiously subtle and fascinating-I have for the first time since my return to India learnt something from somebody else's work.
I was positively stunned and have straight away become a votary of Mathura art to the exclusion of all the other and later schools.
I am always in love, but unfortunately for the party concerned, I fall out of love or rather fall in love with someone else before any damage can be done.
Towards the end of 1933 I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter.
Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me.
"I cannot control my appetiate for color, and I wonder if I ever will."
"My art is not a career, it is myself and I know myself best!"
The life of Indians, particularly the poor, pictorially....with a new technique, my own technique...and this technique though not technically Indian, in the traditional sense of the word, will yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit.
Traditions that were once vital, sincere and splendid and which are now merely empty formulae, [nor to imitate fifth rate western art slavishly] break away from both and produce something vital, connected with the soil, something essentially Indian.
Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musee Guimet is worth more than a whole Renaissance.'
...was to interpret the life of Indians and particularly the poor Indians, pictorially.
I shall in future be obliged to resign myself to exhibiting them (her paintings) merely at the Grand Salon, Paris, of which I happen to be an Associate and the Salon de Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art, and to which I have been invited to participate in the past, a distinction I may add that few can boast of.
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