New illustrated biography tries to make sense of Amrita Sher-Gil

In Paris, Amrita Sher-Gil became close friends with several artists, including Marie-Louise Chassany, Boris Taslitzky, Denise Proutaux and Marie-Yvonne Meheut. Illustrations/Kalyani Ganapathy for Amrita Sher-Gil: Rebel With A Paintbrush, HarperCollins Children's Books

Before Amrita Dalma Sher-Gil (1913-1941) came to be known as one of the finest avant-garde female artists of the 20th century, she was still a child, who was torn between the mundaneness of Europe and her intense longing for India. Captivated by the vast palette of colours she saw around her, Amrita, who was born to a Sikh father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, and Hungarian mother, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann-Erdöbaktay, had a peripatetic life that would take her across the length and breadth of two different worlds, and would also, influence the artist that she would go on to become. However, when children's writer Anita Vachharajani - piqued by one of Amrita's paintings, Three Girls - read about her, she found that the story of this versatile painter had been overshadowed by everything, except art.

Kalyani Ganapathy

"A lot of the information on Amrita focussed on her lovers or her sexuality. And, from my own observation, limited as it may be, this is how we tend to engage with women artists," says the 46-year-old Mumbai-based writer. "But what struck me about Amrita was her determination to work hard, her amazing vision and the wide exposure she had to art from both the East and the West."

Keen on recreating the forces that drew Amrita into the world of painting, and the rigour with which she constantly worked on her style, Vachharajani has penned a biography on the late painter, for young readers, titled Amrita Sher-Gil: Rebel With A Paintbrush (HarperCollins Children's Books). With over 50 illustrations by Kalyani Ganapathy and selected paintings of the artist, Vachharajani covers a gamut of experiences that went into the making of Amrita, who had a short, yet prolific artistic career - she died at the age of 28 in Lahore. "Since I have absolutely no art history background, I used several reference books on art, including books on Amrita by her close friend N Iqbal Singh, an amazing volume of her letters and writings collected by her nephew, the artist Vivan Sundaram, and one by the art historian Yashodhara Dalmia," says Vachharajani. Her main goal, however, was to write about art and the artist in a way that "makes sense, and is not full of jargon", so that children and young adults can find it relatable.

Anita Vachharajani

And, both Vachharajani and Ganapathy, who has also designed the book, manage to stupendously take us through this whirlwind trajectory of the painter. It begins when Amrita's maternal uncle, Ervin Baktay, a scholar and artist, who gives her a sketchbook. Her life took on a different course, when she went to study art in Paris - Amrita was the first Indian student to study in the prestigious 350-year-old L'École des Beaux-Arts or the School of Fine Arts - and would rapidly change when she moved back to India. Ganapathy, a key collaborator, who helped bring life to this biography with her hand-drawn illustrations, says, "The idea was to encapsulate moments of Amrita's life, but capture them in a way that a child would."

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