Amrita Sher-Gil: Painter Extraordinaire, A National Treasure

HERZINDAGI brings you stories of incredible strength and grit. These are stories of women legends who ought to be called HEROINES. They have inspired and motivated so many of us, long after they have gone.

This week we bring you the amazing story of Amrita Sher-Gil who was an avant-garde Hungarian-Indian painter of the early 20th Century whose works gained huge recognition after her death. She became a known name at the young age of 19 after her beautiful painting Young Girls won accolades and an election for her at the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933. Her painting Village Scene sold for Rs 6.9 crores in 2006 which was a record-breaking amount at that time.

The Footprints Of A Legend Named Amrita Sher-Gil

• India’s cultural center in the European city of Budapest has been named the Amrita Sher-Gil Cultural Center to honour this great painter who still continues to inspire many artists.
• She is the inspiration behind the well-known Urdu play Tumhari Amrita and her work forms the main theme of the Amrita Chowdhury novel Faking It.
• The year 2013 was declared to be the international year of Amrita Sher-Gil by the UNESCO on her 100th anniversary birth.
• Salman Rushdie based a character, Aurora Zogoiby, in his 1995 novel The Moor's Last Sigh, after Amrita Sher-gil and she was sometimes compared to the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo as both of them created a radical fusion of Western and traditional arts.