In Amrita Sher-Gil’s rare sculpture, the secret strength of tigers and women at rest

In a rare sculpture of tigers, the manifold skills of the artist Amrita Sher-Gil reveal themselves. Known mainly for her luminous paintings, her work changed the face of modern art and paved the course it was to take in India. She was able to bring her Western training to the existing traditions of Indian art and melded them together to express contemporary reality.

Born in Budapest on 30 January 1913 of a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother, Sher-Gil left India for Paris in 1929 when she was only sixteen. She studied for some months at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and was then admitted to École des Beaux-Arts, the primary art institute in Paris at the time. Here, she went through the drill from studio portraits to nudes to landscapes. Indeed, her painting of a nude (Nude, 1933) won her the Gold Medal at the Grand Salon in 1933, and she became an associate of the Salon – quite an honour for a young student from Asia. It was primarily for the sake of the artistic development that she felt she was destined for that Sher-Gil decided to abandon her fairly active café and night life in Paris to return to India.

She reached...

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