Women Artist ABCs: Amrita Sher-Gil

Happy #WomensHistoryMonth! You don't have to visit the museum to learn more about women artists changing the world- you can enjoy #artwhereyouare through #museumfromhome. Outsight is starting a series of blog posts about women artists through the alphabet! A is for...

Amrita Sher-Gil was a Hungarian-Indian painter. Born in Budapest in 1913, Amrita gained recognition from a young age. She is an incredibly significant painter of 20th-century India. She once wrote,

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

Amrita Sher-Gil was born to a Hungarian-Jewish mother and a Sikh-Punjabi father, and most of her early childhood was spent in Europe. At the age of 19, Amrita painted her first important work, ‘Young Girls’, which got her a gold medal at the Grand Salon of 1933 in Paris. She visited India frequently and it soon became Sher-Gil’s ‘artistic mission’ to express Indian life and people on her canvas. Most of Sher-Gil’s works are now in the National Gallery of Modern Art's collection in New Delhi.

Three Girls, 1935 / Young Girls, 1932 / Bride's Toilet, 1937

top illustration by Emily Cronin