Amrita Sher-Gil, ahead of her time.

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Amrita Sher-Gil, an amazing creative personality and a splendid mysterious woman who brought Modernism in art to the subcontinent.

Amrita was born in 1913 and raised partially in Budapest, Hungary, and Shimla, India.

Thus, she grew up with one foot in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the other in what was then British India (present day Pakistan). Born with a firm place in upper-crust society, her mother was a bourgeoise, Hungarian opera singer (named Marie Antoinette, no less) who met her father, Umrao Singh, whilst on holiday with her friend Princess Bamba Sutherland in India. Amrita's father was a Sikh Punjabi aristocrat, so she and her younger sister grew up in very intellectual and multilingual households, exchanging ideas in English or French one moment and Hungarian the next. Due to her  bi-cultural upbringing, and her constant travels between India and Europe, her work comes across as an immersion, absorption and very detailed understanding of aesthetic styles and traditions of the West and the East.

It was clear that Amrita, who had already started sketching the family's household staff, was destined for a future in the arts.

“It seems to me that I never began painting that I have always painted. And I have always had, with a strange certitude, the conviction that I was meant to be a painter and nothing else”, wrote the artist in her book of memories “Evolution of My Art”.

So she did the best thing a girl can at 16-years-old, and moved to Paris.

There, she studied at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where Picasso, Manet and Cezanne painted, as well as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts - both terribly fun places to grow not only as an artist, but as a creative minded young woman. This wasn't just Paris. It was the Roaring Twenties in Paris.

Amrita started to experiment - with colour, with technique, and with love.

One of her rumoured lovers was Marie-Louise Chassany, a fellow student at the Beaux-Arts. It's said that many of Amrita's romantic partners figured in her portraits, and Marie-Louise had three to her name.

Amrita's work was some of the best at the Beaux-Arts, and her painting Young Girls (1932) earned her both a gold medal, and a spot as an associate of Paris' 1933 Grand Salon. It would've been impressive for anyone her age, but it was particularly epic considering her gender and ethnic background. Amrita was the toast of the town, and her piercing self-portraits became one of her staples.

Just as Amrita was taking off in Paris, one of her teachers suggested that she move back to her beloved India where she'd be more "in her element" to paint the subjects and culture she so admired. It might sound like xenophobic sabotage masked as career advice, but Amrita did think her teacher made an interesting point: there was room to do something different in India.

"I can only paint in India," she wrote, "Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque... India belongs only to me".

In 1934, she moved to back to Shimla, India.

At a time when most artists portrayed women as content and compliant, Sher-Gil’s treatment of female subjects was singularly unique, revealing their loneliness or silent resolve. This was perhaps a reflection of her own isolation in a life caught between different worlds. Nonetheless, she came to be seen as an arbiter of style in India, a symbol of the glamour of the inter-war years.

Amrita and her husband, Victor, decided to move to the artistically vibrant city of Lahore (present-day Pakistan). There, they lived at 23 Ganga Ram Mansions, The Mall. Amrita's studio was on the top floor of the townhouse, and she was just prepping for her next major one-woman show in town when the unthinkable happened. Amrita fell ill - so ill, that she fell into a coma. A few days later, at just 28-years-old, she passed away in December, 1941.

To this day, there's a lot of mystery around Amrita's death. Some historians believe she could have died from a failed abortion, or tuberculosis. Others suspect foul play, as Amrita continued to have affairs right up until her death.

Her own mother, for example, believed that the jealous Victor - who would've had ample access to harmful substances as a doctor - killed her daughter.

Scandals aside, Amrita left behind a legacy of some 200 paintings (many of them are on display at the Modern Art Gallery in New Dehli).

In life and art Sher-Gil was a woman both within and ahead of her time, breaking boundaries that make her one of India's most compelling figures of the 20th century.

Sources: messynessychic.com / Sotheby’s

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