Sher-Gil's enduring legacy

Next week, a second self-portrait by Amrita Sher-Gil will come up for auction at Christie's in London. Earlier this year, a full-lipped portrait had been auctioned by Sotheby's in New York, being claimed for a jaw-dropping Rs 18.4 crore by a Manhattan-based Indian hedge fund honcho. For a self-portrait by any Indian artist, it is a record price, and analysts are watching to see whether the beret-wearing version that comes under the gavel on June 10 will inspire similar sentiments. Almost certainly, it will further increase the value of her paintings.

What is the reason for our enduring love affair with Amrita? While some of it has to do with the tragic soap opera that her life has come to represent - a tempestuous artist of mixed parentage returning home to India, her aching beauty and headstrong persona, a flawed mother-daughter relationship, marriage to an American, and a controversial death by miscarriage - her dedication to her art practice and the early stirrings of Indian modernism have been her key contribution to 20th century Indian art. The results of her short painterly career have been reasonably well-documented, and the largesse of the family in enshrining a sizeable collection at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, has kept her in the public eye. Her own well thought out arguments surrounding her work in particular, and Indian art in general, have shaped the discourse on Indian modernism, resulting in an abiding interest in her own work. And given the rarity of those works, excitement in and around such outings remains high when they appear for sale.

Yet, it is Sher-Gil's legacy, more than her personal life, that should interest us. Hers was by no means the first attempt to create a modern vocabulary for the country. Fed up with the Western academic style being imposed on them, Indian artists had started rejecting its canons to discover their own "native" voices, resulting in what came to be known as the Bengal School that came to be criticised for its sentimental stylisation, but had probably the most impact on Indian art in the last century. Jamini Roy too was seen as a stylist. Raja Ravi Varma had already, by then, been disregarded as a modernist, though his influence too has remained popular, as has that of M V Dhurandhar, even though they painted in the Western style and their subjects were awash in romanticism. The particular yoke of modernism would eventually be borne by Amrita Sher-Gil and - somewhat impossibly - by Rabindranath Tagore.

Tagore continues to be admired and collected in equal measure even though he was never a professional artist and, depending on your point of view, his celebrity either dwarfed or enhanced his stature as a painter. It was Sher-Gil who, seeking her roots in the classical miniatures and Ajanta frescoes, carried the burden of that emerging voice on her slender shoulders. Rejecting the canons of the Paris salon under which she had trained at Beaux-Arts, she sought to flatten the planes of colour in her canvases, resulting in unflattering yet appealing images made intimate by the everydayness of her subjects. Here were yokels and peasants and normal, not Westernised, Indians, who, far from being objectified, were parsed of notions of false nobility, shorn of trappings of ridiculously romanticised glamour, cast in their own everyday image.

The Christie's self-portrait depicts her in side profile. There is a deliberate keenness in her eyes and determination in her demeanour. Sher-Gil, it appears, knew she was destined for greatness. She achieved it, though she died unseasonably young and without seeing it for herself. Bear that in mind as Christie's pronounces a fresh value to her work, and the self-portrait shifts to a new address.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated