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Thursday, November 02, 2006
Amrita Sher-Gil in Munich
I was in Munich for a couple of days and was at a bit of a loose end, when I got an email from my better half, forwarding an article on Amrita Sher-Gil. I read it with interest and learnt that there was a retrospective of Amrita Sher-Gil’s works on at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
I arrived at Prinzregentenstrasse on a Thursday evening - the first snow of the season was falling around me and München looked like a city of fairytale and legend. The cab driver was suitably amazed that I actually wanted to go the Museum Haus der Kunst and not the famous nightclub P1 which is next to the museum, and which attracts the celebrities in Munich in droves (Boris Becker is a regular, apparently). He drove off, shaking his head and muttering “Es nimmt alle Sorten, die Welt zu machen“ under his breath.
My first impression of the interiors of the Haus der Kunst was that it badly needed a lick of paint. The walls were aquamarine and somewhat dated. The floor looked about a hundred years old. But I forgot about the walls and floor in about two seconds – as soon as I entered the exhibition “Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist’s Family in the 20th Century".
The exhibition was setup in three large rooms – one room for Amrita, one for her father Umrao Sher-Gil and one room for Vivan Sundaram(who is Amrita’s nephew and an artist in his own right).
I’ll not dwell on the paintings here since a lot has been written about them – suffice it to say that they were somewhat uneven in quality. Many were good, some looked like a daub a teenager might have done. I suppose that shows the maturation of the artist – from the time that she was a sixteen-year-old in Paris at the Salon to the time she died in Lahore at the age of 28. One thing which especially caught my attention was the colour of the eyes on one of her paintings of 2 Indian women from 1939. The eyes were pale blue with no eyeballs – as popularized by Modigliani. It looked so out of place that I couldn’t help wondering whether it was an experiment gone bad and whether Amrita would have wanted that painting displayed at all or buried quietly in the family backyard.
What was more interesting was a set of letters that Amrita had written to her parents, sister and husband. We always tend to think of artists as one-dimensional, as if all they ever did was paint. The letters actually showed that Amrita was, in many ways, a young women like any other – whether discussing shoes with her sister Indira (apparently she desperately wanted the “suede pair with medium heels”) or feeling unloved and starved for admirers and attention. She was a good correspondent, able to write fluently in English, French and Hungarian. She held forth at length on art and philosophy and was obviously highly intelligent. What made her even more human were the misspellings (she stuck steadfastly to the “ ‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’” rule and thus misspelt “conceive’” and “receive” consistently). One thing which the exhibition could have done better is to showcase the letters appropriately. They were just pages stuck on the wall. It would have had much more impact if the letters were properly framed and mounted.
Vivan Sundaram’s photographs had a peculiarly arresting quality to them. I looked closely and realized that they were actually digitally manipulated. Some of them were very inventive indeed. A photograph of Amrita and her husband Victor Egan superimposed on a landscape with snow by Amrita was absolutely brilliant – you couldn’t tell where the photo ended and the painting began.
Just as I was leaving the show, a cabinet with newspaper clippings caught my eye. It had a page from the “Bombay Sentinel” of 1936 which compared Amrita to “a modern Fragonard” and went on to wax lyrical about her in the flowery sentences typical of the late colonial period. My gaze flickered down the page – slightly below the article was a quarter-page advertisement for some capsules which were guaranteed to “Maintain your vitality, Miri Jaan” and had a picture of a well-endowed lady peddling these capsules. The bathos was stark – going by her letters, Amrita Sher-Gil would have appreciated that with a chuckle.
I arrived at Prinzregentenstrasse on a Thursday evening - the first snow of the season was falling around me and München looked like a city of fairytale and legend. The cab driver was suitably amazed that I actually wanted to go the Museum Haus der Kunst and not the famous nightclub P1 which is next to the museum, and which attracts the celebrities in Munich in droves (Boris Becker is a regular, apparently). He drove off, shaking his head and muttering “Es nimmt alle Sorten, die Welt zu machen“ under his breath.
My first impression of the interiors of the Haus der Kunst was that it badly needed a lick of paint. The walls were aquamarine and somewhat dated. The floor looked about a hundred years old. But I forgot about the walls and floor in about two seconds – as soon as I entered the exhibition “Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist’s Family in the 20th Century".
The exhibition was setup in three large rooms – one room for Amrita, one for her father Umrao Sher-Gil and one room for Vivan Sundaram(who is Amrita’s nephew and an artist in his own right).
I’ll not dwell on the paintings here since a lot has been written about them – suffice it to say that they were somewhat uneven in quality. Many were good, some looked like a daub a teenager might have done. I suppose that shows the maturation of the artist – from the time that she was a sixteen-year-old in Paris at the Salon to the time she died in Lahore at the age of 28. One thing which especially caught my attention was the colour of the eyes on one of her paintings of 2 Indian women from 1939. The eyes were pale blue with no eyeballs – as popularized by Modigliani. It looked so out of place that I couldn’t help wondering whether it was an experiment gone bad and whether Amrita would have wanted that painting displayed at all or buried quietly in the family backyard.
What was more interesting was a set of letters that Amrita had written to her parents, sister and husband. We always tend to think of artists as one-dimensional, as if all they ever did was paint. The letters actually showed that Amrita was, in many ways, a young women like any other – whether discussing shoes with her sister Indira (apparently she desperately wanted the “suede pair with medium heels”) or feeling unloved and starved for admirers and attention. She was a good correspondent, able to write fluently in English, French and Hungarian. She held forth at length on art and philosophy and was obviously highly intelligent. What made her even more human were the misspellings (she stuck steadfastly to the “ ‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’” rule and thus misspelt “conceive’” and “receive” consistently). One thing which the exhibition could have done better is to showcase the letters appropriately. They were just pages stuck on the wall. It would have had much more impact if the letters were properly framed and mounted.
Vivan Sundaram’s photographs had a peculiarly arresting quality to them. I looked closely and realized that they were actually digitally manipulated. Some of them were very inventive indeed. A photograph of Amrita and her husband Victor Egan superimposed on a landscape with snow by Amrita was absolutely brilliant – you couldn’t tell where the photo ended and the painting began.
Just as I was leaving the show, a cabinet with newspaper clippings caught my eye. It had a page from the “Bombay Sentinel” of 1936 which compared Amrita to “a modern Fragonard” and went on to wax lyrical about her in the flowery sentences typical of the late colonial period. My gaze flickered down the page – slightly below the article was a quarter-page advertisement for some capsules which were guaranteed to “Maintain your vitality, Miri Jaan” and had a picture of a well-endowed lady peddling these capsules. The bathos was stark – going by her letters, Amrita Sher-Gil would have appreciated that with a chuckle.
