20th -century Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil, whose brief and brilliant career ended with her tragic death at the age of 28.
Sixty years before Tracey Emin, Sher-Gil scandalised audiences around the world by putting women’s bodies – her own, her friends’ and those of ordinary Indians – at the centre of her extraordinary art.
By the time she died in 1941 her paintings were only beginning to become popular in India and in Europe. ‘I hate cheap emotional appeal,’ she declared as she went about challenging the clichés of the ‘exotic East’ – bejewelled figures posing in splendour with an elephant somewhere in the mix – with her truthful painting, full of the heat and dust of 20th-century India as it emerged from a century of British rule.
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