Amrita Shergil & Frida Kahlo! Should We Even Compare?

Krispin Joseph PX

Why is celebrated female Artists Amrita Sherl Gil known as Indian Frida Kahlo? Both of them were living (Amrita Sher-Gil was born in 1913 and died in 1941, and Frida was born in 1907 and died in 1954) at the same time in history and were affected by the war on different continents. Both painters are in the quest for Art practice through their homeland stories, folk, nature and visual atmosphere. 

Why Amrita and Frida are considered and compared as the same, not because of the Artworks’ pictorial representation, but because of the Artwork’s life and subjects and the way they represented their works is make resemblance, because of the Art practice, started and ended in the vein of visual narrations.

Amrita Sherl Gil, one of the most gifted and top-selling female Indian artists of the previous year, engraved her signature on contemporary Indian Art with a rural Indian physique. Amrita Sher Gil lived only for 28 years; within a short time, she has known Indian Frida Kahlo. Born to a Punjabi Sikh father and a Hungarian-Jewish mother who lived and studied in India and Europe, she is considered one of the most influential women artists of 20th-century Indian Art.  

Amrita Sher Gil spent her early time in Budapest; her niece and Indologist Ervin Baktay critically engaged with Amrita Sher Gil’s art life. He gives her an academic background and strongly suggests or instructs her to employ servants as models for the paintings. That modelling may help Amrita Sher Gil when she returned to India to find out the women’s life from the marginal side of society. In 1929 she left India at sixteen to study Fine Arts at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, France, where she started to paint seriously. She started following great Artists like Cezanne and Gauguin, and Western aesthetics is slowly reflected in her works.  

French Art schooling is intriguing and changed Amrita Sher-Gil’s idea and perception of Art; after finishing her work ‘Young Girls’ in early 1930, she was selected as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris. In 1934, Amrita Sher-Gil returned to India as a physical return and as an Indian subject, spirit and technical expression of Art. Marginalised women’s life and poor village and beggars become the subject of Amrita Sher-Gil after her return to India. 

Her return to India is a part of her quest to rediscover traditional Indian Art; later, she wrote to her friend: “I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque… India belongs only to me. Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting will tell about this return to India, how it reflected in her paintings and the subject of the paintings; from ‘Young Girls’ (1932) to ‘Three Girls’ (1935), Amrita Sher-Gil’s subject changed to Indian life and environment. 

In the book ‘When Was Modernism’ (2000,) Art-Critic Geeta Kapoor writes about Amrita Sher-Gil’s- Frida Kahlo’s Artworks and their similar elements, and we understand, Why we called Amrita Sher-Gil an Indian Frida. In her essay titled ‘Body as Gesture: Women Artists at Work’, Geeta Kapoor analysed Amrita-Frida’s ‘female/feminist marking of nationalism through what one may call the emblematic selfhood of a woman protagonist (P3). These two female identities discover the flow of Art-practice concerning their time and space, and how those things are reflected in their Artworks is a matter of discussion in Geeta Kapoor’s text. How do Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo construct linguistic signs that convert play into reflection? For Kapoor, ‘Sher-Gil made an irreversible social space for the woman artist within Indian art, and she did this on an expressly romantic brief (p5)’. What is the principal link that builds Amrita- Frida in a time and space is, according to Geeta Kapoor, a ‘nationalist considerations about the native woman of genius in her excessively embodied, inevitably idealised form’. Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo place their body into the visual discourse; through their Art practice, they bring the ideal women’s nature and life into the nation’s cultural identity. They get their body and other marginalised female bodies into the work of Art and discourse in the male-dominated Art scene.   

For Geeta Kapoor, Sher-Gil’s intensely protective of her women as ‘subjects’ allowed them their seclusion; functioning without the feminist discourse, she dramatised herself instead, how Amrita Sher-Gil’s artistic practice works as emancipatory agenda in his generation, as M F Hussian acknowledged later. 

Mexican revolution is an embodied element of Frida Kahlo’s works, and ‘the Mexican mural movement of the 1920s had already established a monumental precedent for converting a civilisational into a national-revolutionary project. This later developed into an allegorical style for third-world Art (p6). The West and East interlinking element is remarkable for Amrita and Frida, where these links merge two identities of ‘Nation’ and ‘Body’. They turn their artistic practice into a visual resemblance of romantic-realistic Modernism. Amrita Sher-Gil overlooked what she learned from the European art school; women as a hybrid body of unusual beauty. She was reinventing the oriental subject of women’s bodies and their lives, which flourished in their landscapes. 

Geeta Kapoor suggests ‘that there was an undoing of the fetish in the masquerade. There was something like a voluntary barter where the self-conscious subject (the artist) offered herself as the desired object to the viewer instead of the images she painted and whose autonomy she was keen to secure (p17). Amrita and Frida present themselves as an object of spectacle in the composition, but they question the ongoing visual culture through their presence as an observer and points of discourse. 

Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo represent Modernism in different countries and cultural settings. At the same time, both artists create the Artwork from a secluded, personal space and feminine elements of the artist’s life. Their personal life is not ‘private’ and exclusive but open to women’s social settings and their environment of marginal life. Her life span is short, and there are fewer works to comprehend the Art practice of Amrita within an Idea of the modernist practice of art making. What she produced already is enough to understand an artist’s hypothetical visual overview.    

References

Kapoor, Geeta. When Was Modernism? New Delhi: Tulika, 2000.