Avant-garde artist Amrita Sher-Gil believed all art, including religious, came into being because of a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical and she experienced the rawness of art for the first time when she visited Ajanta and Ellora, says a new book.
The Indo-Hungarian painter often used to wonder how one can feel the beauty of form, the intensity or the subtlety of colour, the quality of line unless one is a sensualist of the eye. But after she visited Ajanta and Ellora, she was left wonderstruck by their “breath-taking lyricism”.
She wrote to her parents that Ajanta is wonderful, according to the book “Amrita & Victor” written by Ashwini Bhatnagar. The book tells the story of Sher-Gil and her unconventional relationship with her first cousin Victor Egan, whom she married later. It also delves into the captivating narrative of Sher-Gil, an emblematic figure who symbolised the rich cultural fusion between Hungary and India, her family, her work, and her relationships with other men.
Sher-Gil explored Ellora in detail but apart from the structure, was struck by its silence, says the book, published by Fingerprint! She told her sister Indira that Ellora is the “most silent place that I have ever experienced. One does not know what silence is, what it can be, till one has been to Ellora”.
The author also writes that Sher-Gil believed “all art, including religious art, has come into being because of a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical”. The book says Sher-Gil was hyper-critical of the paintings that were being produced in the name of depicting the earthy Indianness of India.
Quoting from her diary, it says: “Those so-called paintings that depict an India where the sun shines with an inevitability only equaled by the mediocrity of conception and execution of that sunlight as it plays on the fresh tints of standardized grey-browns and gives opportunity to the ambitious artists to exploit the possibilities of orange reflected light and blue half lights.” “Those serene or sun-flooded landscapes with authentically Indian ruins in the ‘middle distance’ serve as trademarks, conclusive, irrefutable proofs as to the genuineness of the article (manufactured in India), but not one brushstroke of which conveys India really,” it adds.
The book was launched last month at the Embassy of Hungary by Ambassador Istvan Szabo and art historian Alka Pande. Bhatnagar emphasized that the book is based on meticulously documented letter exchanges between Amrita and Victor, vividly capturing their conversations, incidents, and the unfolding of their remarkable relationship.
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