| The Vina Player and Portrait of the Khan of Shewa | Amrita Sher-Gil

August 20, 2015

After being introduced to Amrita Sher-Gil’s work, I have been thinking a lot about the politics of representation: ethnicity, class and the Orient.

August 21, 2015

According to art historian Marcella Nesom Sirhandi, Sher-Gil’s formative years were spent in both India and Europe. Her mother came from Hungary and father from India. She studied at the Ecole des Beaux in Paris, writes Sirhandi in her book, Contemporary Painting in Pakistan. Sher-Gil first showed her work at the Grand Salon there in 1932 before moving to India in 1934 and developed a unique personal style, playing off dominant painting trends in Europe and India at the time.

Her canvases are distinct in their representation of Indian rural life. The dark brown bodies that appear in her paintings are exotic and brightly coloured, borrowing heavily from Gauguin’s work. Sher-Gil’s work signifies a desire to embrace “Indian-ness”; it simultaneously points towards her ambition to be international and distinct. She was undeniably influenced by Western art tropes, yet she managed to retain her multi-ethnic identity in her art.

In 1941, Sher-Gil moved to Lahore and died shortly thereafter. It is interesting to find references to her in writings on Pakistani art, sometimes describing her “to be our own”, yet she belonged to another country – the undivided subcontinent – that existed before 1947. In what could be an indirect suggestion of where she belonged, only two out of the many paintings by Sher-Gil remain in Pakistan.

August 24, 2015

I am ushered into the residence of a famed collector. One has to take a narrow flight of stairs to get into his house. The hallways are covered with art; I have to make an effort to keep my wits in place — this is not a museum but it could easily be one. I make my way into one of the bedrooms where a Sher-Gil painting hangs amongst works from many modernist giants from the subcontinent.

Sher-Gil’s Portrait of the Khan of Shewa, Dr. F.M. Khan hangs in the top right corner of a wall. Masterfully painted, the image is composed of moderate to neutral hues. The paint application is delicate and the pigments are layered to create a certain degree of depth on the two dimensional surface. The subject, however, remains flat despite the treatment. Due to the artist’s training in Europe, it can be assumed that she was privy to the influence of Japanese prints on modernism in the West. Keeping that in mind, the flatness of the portrait can be considered intentional.

The subject of the painting sits with an air of confidence. He demands to be looked at and appreciated; the painter, too, seems to be aware of this fact. His garb suggests that he is well-to -do, coming from the same socio-economic class as the artist. It is not difficult to notice that the artist is familiar with the subject and the society he is a part of. The subject is rendered with precision, almost effortlessly, and reflects the early Indian period of Sher-Gil’s work. The artist, it seems, was yet to develop her unique style, which had a lot to do with race consciousness and grappling with issues and subjects which she was not familiar with.

The paint application is delicate and the pigments are layered to create a certain degree of depth on the two dimensional surface. The subject, however, remains flat despite the treatment.

September 10, 2015

I am looking at photographs of The Vina Player, a painting which can be viewed in person at the Lahore Museum. This is one of the only two paintings by Sher-Gil left in Pakistan, and the only one available for public viewing.

In this painting, Sher-Gil’s unique style has matured. The distinct dark brown bodies appear with simplified form. One of the figures is draped in an orange sari which, next to an overwhelming amount of brown, has a jarring impact on the eye. The figures and the backdrop are loosely painted, communicating a sense of haste and depicting a scene that comes across as if it has not been fully internalised by the artist — unlike the Portrait of the Khan of Shewa.

September 14, 2015

After leafing through several books and reading a handful of articles, it becomes clear to me that Sher-Gil was a product of history, politics, society and economic privilege. It is surprising to notice that her racially conscious paintings have not generated any critical dialogue. Her work, like our colonial legacy, largely remains unquestioned.

Within the context of postcolonial studies, one has to engage with race and other issues previously repressed in discussions pertaining to Sher-Gil’s work. We have to point out the problematic nature of her fetishisation of brown bodies. Kobena Mercer, an art historian at Yale University, suggests that “[w]hat is represented in the pictorial space of the [painting] … is a ‘look,’ or a certain ‘way of looking,’ the [paintings] … say more about the [artist] … than they do about the [brown] … bodies we see depicted”. Paintings such as The Vina Player play on the stereotypical distinction between civilized culture, signified by the artist, and the primitive beings, embodied in the brown figures. One has to figure out if Sher-Gil’s works, as Mercer says, “provide an unequivocal yes/no answer to the question of whether [they] … reinforce or undermine commonplace racist stereotypes”. Or do they “throw … the binary structure of the question back to the spectator, where it is torn apart in the disruptive” exotic effect.

In what could be an indirect suggestion of where she belonged, only two out of the many paintings by Sher-Gil remain in Pakistan.

Art critic and historian Hal Foster’s 1993 touchstone article ‘Primitive’ Scenes classifies the above-mentioned concerns as relatively “contemporary” ones, which are “formed historically”. The primitive is often understood by the economically superior –which historically has been the West – as washed-out, racially and culturally a monotone. There is nothing new about this subject position: the primitive or the primordial has served as a racial other that lends himself/herself easily to fit the Western binary construction of self/identity. In Sher-Gil’s work, binary sets of opposition, such as light skin versus dark skin, emerge to assist and construct, but not disrupt, the binary construction of the Western, superior, economically privileged, self/identity. Consequently, the native/primitive/primordial becomes a point of fixation, a figure that stems from a desire deep within (the subconscious) and outside to locate the self in shifting and ever-changing geographies and identity politics.

As spectators of art, critical inquiry is the only tool available to us to illuminate these racially charged depictions of the other. And by doing so, we can begin to understand why the figures depicted on the canvas appear as they do.

This was originally published in the Herald's October 2015 issue. To read more, subscribe to Herald's print edition.