The ‘artist family’ presented in this book spans three generations: Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870-1954), his daughter Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) and his grandson (Amrita’s sister Indira’s son) Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943).
A scion of India’s Sikh aristocracy, Umrao Singh was a nationalist, an independent scholar with philosophical interests, and and eccentric, somewhat Tolstoyan figure in appearance. An amateur photographer of some genius, he took hundreds of photographs of his wife and two daughters which constitute an extraordinary record of the lifeworld of an Indo-European family in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also given to posing himself in front of the camera-sometimes as a preening ascetic or dandy, but often as a man of letters surrounded by his tomes or sitting at his writing table.
The celebrated artist Amrita Sher-Gil was the older daughter of Umrao Singh and his Hungarian wife Marie Antoinette. After spending the first eight years of her life in Budapest where she was born and a further eight years in India where her family returned after World War 1. Amrita’s formal training in art began in 1929, when she was admitted to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. Over the next four years she won many prizes at the Ecole, was elected as associate member of the Grand Salon and gained recognition as a talented figurative painter. In December 1934 Amrita returned to India, to her family home in Simla., and threw herself into traveling and discovering classical and medieal Indian art. She painted most of her best known works in the following six years-a period of prodigious creativity that was tragically cut short due to a brief but fatal illness. Amrita died at midnight on 5/6 December 1941, at the age of 28.
Vivan Sundaram studied art at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda and Slade School, London. He returned to India in 1970 and continued painting for more than two decades before turning to artworks as sculpture, installation, photography and video on wide-ranging themes and concerns. The Sher-Gil project has engaged Vivan for over thirty years as curator, editor, archivist and artist. The artworks include a large painting , The SherGil Family (1983-84); an installation, The Sher- Gil Archive (1995); digital photomontages, Re-take of Amrita (2001-02); and a video, Indira’s Piano (2002-03). He has also compiled and edited the letters and writings of Amrita Sher-Gil, to be published in two volumes in 2008.
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