It was a love triangle that was as Parisian as it was Indian. At the heart of it was Amrita Sher-Gil, a beautiful 18-year-old studying art in Paris. The year was 1931 and the artist was engaged to Yusuf Ali Khan, son of Raja Nawab Ali, a wealthy talukdar from Uttar Pradesh. At the same time there were rumours that she was having an affair with her first cousin, Victor Egan, much to her mother's disapproval.
Torn between the two men in her life, Amrita Sher-Gil painted their portraits. Both men were shown gazing introspectively at the distance. At the same time she painted a self-portrait. The three paintings form a triangle between the lovers, as if in conversation - each avoiding the gaze of the viewer, withholding a secret known only to them.
The rare self-portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil, painted during her tumultuous days as a student in Paris and never before seen in public, is now being brought to auction by Christie's as the centre-point of its South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art Sale in London on June 10. Fittingly for Christie's, it is also a celebration of 20 years of bringing modern and contemporary Indian art to the international sales floor.
It all began when Christie's opened an office in Mumbai in 1994. The first sale of modern and contemporary Indian art took place in New York that year. The next stop was London, where a high-profile auction took place in 1995 featuring the works of modern masters like Maqbool Fida Husain, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Syed Haider Raza, Francis Newton Souza, Tyeb Mehta and Ram Kumar. Husain himself attended, nodding appreciatively as the bids began to climb.
Deepanjana Klein, international head of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art, remembers it clearly. "The cover lot in the October 1995 sale was Madhuri as Menaka by Husain; estimated at £17,000-20,000, it sold for £23,000," she says. "A stunning Gaitonde sold for a mere £11,500. Twenty years later, these artists are recognised as modernist masters and represent the highest value works in the category with many realising prices in the millions."
"As collectors have become more knowledgeable and the market has developed in the last two decades, the market has seen an unrelenting rise for the modernist masters. At the same time there has been a proliferation of a market for contemporary art from the region," she adds.
The growth was reflected in the sale results. Between 1995 and 2005, Christie's sold South Asian modern contemporary art worth approximately $20 million. In 2014 alone Christie's sold in excess of $35.3 million. Apart from the modern masters fetching high prices, contemporary artists like Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher and Atul Dodiya have seen a huge demand.
Klein is very excited about the undiscovered Sher-Gil portrait which will lead the next auction. "This painting is a rare find and a peerless example of the precocious sensitivity of Sher-Gil," she says. The painting will leave its home in a private collection in Paris for the first time in 84 years and is expected to fetch between £1 and 1.8 million.
In the 1931 self-portrait, Sher-Gil paints herself in complete profile - the only one among her 19 documented self-portraits - avoiding any direct interaction with the viewer. However, the composition diagonally cuts through the canvas with the torso almost leaping out of the canvas onto the viewer. The golden bowl sitting empty between her and the viewer reflects the emotional emptiness that she may have experienced as an 18-year-old, torn between the various lovers of her life. One senses the tension and desperation in the protagonist, hauntingly beautiful and magnetic and yet deliberately looking away.
Born in Budapest in 1913 to a Hungarian mother, Marie Antoinette, who was an opera singer, and an Indian father, the pioneering portrait photographer, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Amrita and her younger sister, Indira, had a genteel upbringing in Hungary and India. Her talent for art was quickly recognised by her family, and in 1929 at the age of 16 she was taken to Paris to study with Lucien Simon at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
The young Amrita was completely at home in the smoky dimly-lit cafes with artist friends and intellectuals. Summers were spent in Hungary with cousins, which were some of her happiest moments. However in 1931, her family's income had shrunk enormously as her father's earnings from his jagirs had been confiscated by the British. Her mother went through bouts of depression due to the crisis. She was keen that Amrita marry the wealthy Yusuf Ali.
In a letter to her mother in August 1931, Amrita tried to explain to her how Yusuf perhaps was not the right man for her and her affair with Victor was finished: "All this I am writing because I feel I have a small right to happiness..."
Despite her troubled love life and having to manage her mother's emotions, 1931 was a year that Sher-Gil felt she was beginning to really paint well. In October, she wrote to her mother: "I painted a few very good paintings. Everybody says that I have improved immensely; even that person whose criticism in my view is most important to me - my own self."
In her three years at art school, Sher-Gil won the first prize of the annual portraits and still life competition each year. In 1932, her first picture was exhibited at the Grand Salon. Her hauntingly beautiful self-portraits and portraits of friends and lovers from that period won her election as an associate of the Grand Salon, a rare honour at the time for a young, foreign artist in Paris.
The 1931 self-portrait is one of only eight canvases by Sher-Gil to be offered at auction globally and the first painting by the artist to go on sale in London. The 76 lots in the sale include a monumental canvas by M.F. Husain, that is estimated to fetch between £7,50,000 and £9,00,000, a 1970 painting by Vasudeo S. Gaitonde expected to fetch £6,00,00-8,00,000, Untitled (Blue Bird) by Tyeb Mehta (estimate £6,00,000-8,00,000) Haute Provenance painted in 1961 by S.H. Raza (estimate £2,80,000-4,00,000), and works by Rameshwar Broota, Atul Dodiya and Bharti Kher.
But the star of the show will clearly be Amrita Sher-Gil and her painting of her passionate 18-year-old self.
