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Amrita Sher-Gil
Legacy
“...her depiction of the plight of women has made her art a beacon for women at large both in India and abroad.”
Amrita Sher-Gil working in her studio
Sher-Gil’s art has influenced generations of Indian artists from Sayed Haider Raza to Arpita Singh and her depiction of the plight of women has made her art a beacon for women at large both in India and abroad. The Government of India has declared her works as National Art Treasures, and most of them are housed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Some of her paintings also hang at the Lahore Museum. A postage stamp depicting her painting ‘Hill Women’ was released in 1978 by India Post, and the Amrita Shergil Marg is a road in Lutyens’ Delhi named after her. Her work is deemed to be so important to Indian culture that when it is sold in India, the Indian government has stipulated that the art must stay in the country – fewer than ten of her works have been sold globally. In 2006, her painting Village Scene sold for 6.9 crores at an auction in New Delhi which was at the time the highest amount ever paid for a painting in India.
The Indian cultural center in Budapest is named the Amrita Sher-Gil Cultural Center. Contemporary artists in India have recreated and reinterpreted her works.
Besides remaining an inspiration to many a contemporary Indian artists, in 1993, she also became the inspiration behind the Urdu play Tumhari Amrita.
UNESCO announced 2013, the 100th anniversary of Sher-Gil’s birth, to be the international year of Amrita Sher-Gil.
Sher-Gil’s work is a key theme in the contemporary Indian novel Faking It by Amrita Chowdhury.
Aurora Zogoiby, a character in Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, was inspired by Sher-Gil.
Sher-Gil was sometimes known as India’s Frida Kahlo because of the “revolutionary” way she blended Western and traditional art forms.
In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.
In 2018, at a Sotheby’s auction in Mumbai, Amrita Shergil’s painting “The Little Girl in Blue” was auctioned for a record-breaking 18.69 crores. This painting is a portrait of Amrita’s cousin Babit, a resident of Shimla and was painted in 1934 when the subject was only 8 years old.