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P A S S I O N S · P O R T R A I T S · F I C T I O N S

AMRITA SHER-GIL & BORIS TASLITZKY

P A S S I O N S · P O R T R A I T S · F I C T I O N S

AMRITA SHER-GIL & BORIS TASLITZKY

IMPORTANT NOTICE

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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN ART AUCTION IN LONDON6 OCTOBER 2015 SALE L155002 PM

EXHIBITION

Friday 2 October 9 am-4.30 pm

Saturday 3 October 12 noon-5 pm

Sunday 4 October 1 pm-5 pm

Monday 5 October 9 am-4.30 pm

34-35 New Bond Street London, W1A 2AA +44 (0) 20 7293 5000 sothebys.com

For enquiries related to this lot:Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art Department+44 (0)20 7293 5940

Amrita Sher-GilCourtesy of the Sher-Gil Family Archive, Budapest

“She was born in those far-off lands

where crocodiles devour pilgrims,

where sacred cows eat humans for

food, where princesses are nourished

on pearls. Young tigers were her first

playmates; she learned her first

syllables charming rattlesnakes,

guarded in her sleep by black panthers.

She seemed to have stepped out of a

stone-sculpted fresco to perpetuate

the dramas and mystery of the Brahma

on the banks of the Seine. I lowered

my lids, plunging into her dark eyes, as

though into a velvety bath of authority;

I could not escape, save by falling

under the spell of her incarnadine dark

lips. The Atelier welcomed her in a

transfixed silence. It was quite another

thing when she began to paint, and the

transposition of the model appeared

on the canvas. It was fire, it was flesh, it

was violence allied with tenderness, it

was violation and respect, shock and

passage, harmony in a soul torn apart.”

BORIS TASLITZKY, Tu parles!, 1959

‘Painting always tells the truth’, Amrita Sher-Gil once declared.1 What truths do we learn from her Self-portrait of 1931? Its flamboyance belies its intensity. Amrita with determined brow stares out of the picture with a direct, purposeful expression, her pouting bow lips touched in over bare canvas. The coral band of her beret creates a half-halo around her head, one side cast more in shade. Her dress is white, but of a soft, loosely hanging material, the collar descending to her full décolleté. Black contours around the neckline create deep shadow. An open red rose, pinned to Amrita’s breast, irresistibly suggests her blossoming availability, while a necklace of cherry amber bakelite beads, slung backwards over her shoulder, expresses a certain nonchalance. The background, far from monochrome, is energised with distinct, if ambiguous red and darker forms. The right hand side of the painting is worked with speedy confidence: touches of green, blue and orange are scumbled over with white, applied boldly above the black signature: ‘A. Sher-Gil 31’. Amrita’s eyes hold the velvety depths that her admirer, Boris Taslitzky first perceived, with a glint of the present. One of several Parisian self-portraits in many poses, many moods, made during the years 1930-1932, this work has a singular story. It was a gift to Taslitzky, her fellow-student in the studio of Lucien Simon at the École des Beaux-Arts and remained with him until his death in 2005, subsequently passing to his family.

Arriving in Paris at a very young age, Amrita, as we know, had already been formed as an artist in Budapest, in Simla and in Florence. She was well-travelled; her family instantly joined a certain beau monde where an Indian presence was fêted — from the young Maharaja of Indore or the poet and playwright Baldoon Dhingra, to the taste for odalisques hindoues in the work of Raoul Dufy or Henri Matisse.2 Her father, Umrao Singh, doyen of Hungarian

AMRITA SHER-GIL AND BORIS TASLITZKYPassions, Portraits, FictionsAN ESSAY BY SARAH WILSON

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Lucien Simon’s students, Ecole des Beaux-Arts Amrita Sher-Gil and Boris Taslitzky shown at left of model

Image courtesy: Martin Boyer

indophiles, now joined the learned community around the Musée Guimet and the Sorbonne, at a particularly rich moment of exchange and scholarship.3 Amrita’s twin cultures thus flourished from the start. Umrao Singh recalled that in May 1930, ‘we went to Théâtre Pigalle, to see Amrita’s pictures in the exhibition of the Beaux-Arts Circle of Women, and found Rabindranath Tagore’s modernist drawings also being exhibited in another room of the building’. The catalogue was prefaced by the glamorous Anna de Noailles.4

Amrita found herself at last in the most beautiful city in the Western world, steeped in centuries of history, with a tradition of welcome for artists. Catherine the Great had sent young Russians; Jacques-Louis David’s studio received Italians, Swedes and Americans. During Napoléon III’s Second Empire, Romanians and Portuguese followed, plus Meiji era Japanese. In the 1920s, students came to the École des Beaux-Arts from China and the

Salon des Artistes Français, Grand Palais, 1932 Image courtesy: Bibliothèque nationale de France

Ramon Casas (1886-1932), Portrait of Lucien Simon, 1900 Image courtesy: Martin Boyer

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Boris Taslitzky painting a portrait with two admiring onlookers, circa 1930Image courtesy: Doctor Évelyne Taslitzky

newly independent Turkey; Taslitzky recalls Ethiopians, Canadians, Americans and Latin Americans in the studio. 5 All drew the same models and learned techniques which brought them together: compare Amrita’s fleshy seated Torso, 1932, with heavily shadowed spine (in Delhi), to Xu Beihong’s oil of 1930 depicting the same nude, reclining and seen from the back, (now in his memorial museum, Beijing).6 Amrita was the École’s first Indian student; Gopal Deuksar would be taught by Lucien Simon in 1933.

The architecture of the École as ‘centre of Paris and of France’ was symbolised by Félix Duban’s building. One can imagine the impact on Amrita of the plaster Pantheon in the glazed interior of the Palais des Études: the celebrated Discobolos of Myron or Apollo Belvedere; Michelangelo’s Moses was in the chapel.7 ‘A male nude was not merely a nude but steeped in the memory and the norms of ancient Greek tradition and neo-Platonic idealism, with a contemporary authority transmitted by professors, themselves academicians, who awarded the Grand Prix de Rome in the painted amphitheatre (foreign students were excluded)’.8 Albert Besnard (son of a student of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres) was director. Amrita’s retrospective triumph should be framed by this masculine mystique — despite the presence of women in the École and in Lucien Simon’s mixed atelier, such as her friend Marie-Yvonne Meheut or her fellow-Hungarian Edith Basch.

From Paul Landowski, L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1937

The Palais des Études Le bal des quat’z arts, student carnival

Boris Taslitzky after the portrait sitting, circa 1930. Image courtesy: Dr. Évelyne Taslitzky

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Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Man with Apples (detail), 1932 Courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Amrita first passed through the celebrated Grande Chaumière School in Montparnasse from April, 1929, thanks to a recommendation by the Hungarian Jozsef Nemes (linked to her uncle Ervin Baktay). Pierre Henri Vaillant ‘corrected’ her drawings of the model. Lucien Simon who looked into the atelier (having risen to greater heights) probably first encountered Amrita there, allowing her, though underage, to come to his classes. His openness and liberal encouragement at the École have been compared to Gustave Moreau, his predecessor and master of the fauve painters, Georges Rouault or Henri Matisse. Born in 1861, Simon, not an École alumnus himself, was by this time in his late sixties. His own painting was hugely successful: initially academic, then softened by the contexts of impressionism and post-impressionism and his long relationship with Brittany.9 He had received a plethora of important honours by October 1929, the date we first find a trace in the annals of ‘Sheir-Gil’. 10 Despite his laxity, Amrita’s time at the École was structured by the constant rhythm of competitions: portraits, nudes, weekly sketches (the subjects as varied as ‘Interior of a Department Store’ and ‘The Original Sin of Adam and Eve’), ‘end of year’ competitions and holiday work.11 Was this rhythm, together with the internal dynamics of the school and the possibility of exhibiting in what Amrita called the ‘Grand Salon’ (the official Salon des Artistes Français) the reason why there is never a mention in her letters of the avant-garde (Hungarian or Parisian)— of surrealism, abstraction, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali or Piet Mondrian?12

Taslitzky dates Amrita’s first, unforgettable impact to 1930; a competition for him with the centenary of Romanticism and Eugene Delacroix at the Louvre. She was seventeen, he was nineteen years old.13 ‘Delacroix was my passion…. I moved at ease in his magnificent tempest, with never a backward look at the street — or my century.’ But Delacroix, Géricault, Chardin, Corot, Ingres, David, masters of the Western tradition in the Louvre, are eclipsed when he sees Amrita:

‘Immortal is my name’ Amrita declares as a riposte to his saucy ‘Good morning Michelangelo’. ‘Immortal! Why didn’t I guess it? Immortal of course! Triple idiot, how could she have been called anything else?’ The meeting immediately turns into an art contest: You like Michelangelo? He’s my god’ she replies. Another student intervenes: ‘He’s boring, just an ass’… he narrows his eyes, lost in admiration for his own canvas murmuring ‘Cézanne is the greatest painter in the world’. ‘I love him too’ Amrita replies, I love him as a genius, like all geniuses, but I put Michelangelo and Beethoven above everyone.’ The student looks on, smiling ironically, scratching the muddy paint on his palette mechanically, ‘Just a bit more effort, my beauty, go as far as Géricault and you’ll be a real couple of agitators, Igor and you. We’ll marry you off together....’14 (‘Igor’ replaces ‘Boris’ here.) They are indeed brought together by their love of Géricault. Brusquely, Amrita departs after just a week, for a three-month tour of Italy, England, ‘ten other countries and Hungary’. Taslitzky has to get out a globe to catch up with his geography.…

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comfortable. You can’t imagine, Igor, how I’d like to be poor. Don’t make those furious eyes at me, you amuse me….. Embrace me, Monsieur Saint-Just. Do you really want to cut my head off?’18

Amrita’s reference here to the French revolution (her Hungarian mother was called Marie-Antoinette after all) was deliberate. The issue of class — or caste — of wealth, of lifestyle would always stand between the two of them, though Taslitzky, whose Russian father was killed fighting for France in 1915, had risen from the status of semi-orphaned pupille de la nation via his mother’s remarriage. The brother-in-law of her new husband, Vitia Rosenblum, was the Catholic writer Stanislas Fumet, who was linked to the circles of Jacques Maritain and his Russian wife Raïssa. Boris’s new family also held soirées for poets, artists and writers. His mother would insist nonetheless that ‘Shepherd boys cannot marry princesses’….19

‘Ordinary people’, however — simple peasants in the Hungarian winter, rustic village dwellers or tragic child brides in India — would become Amrita’s later subject matter, while Taslitzky’s painting would ally itself with the urban proletariat. The tenderness, the harmony of greys and blues in Sher-Gil’s portrait of his mother, once a simple seamstress, and her new sympathy with the person and sufferings of the paid École des Beaux-Arts models in 1932-33, is symptomatic of her developing conscience. Imagining the shared conversations of between the amorous couple, one divines deeper grounds for genuine exchange. Amrita’s childhood had been marked by the impact in Budapest of the First World War and turmoil resulting in Béla Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. She was well aware of both ‘Communist revolution’ and the anti-British, anti-colonial engagement of her father

Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled (Portrait of Boris Taslitzky), circa 1930. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1931 © Christies Images / Bridgeman Images

Taslitzky’s disguised memoirs of 1959 reveal Amrita as his first passionate love. He recalls vital moments together which stand out from passages of student banter. Whatever the problems of recall and undoubted poetic licence, we must depend on his account, for there is a significant gap in Amrita’s letters published by Vivan Sundaram between 26 February 1929 — just before the family’s arrival in Paris, and 17 July 1931.15 These gaps cover the crucial months of the Sher-Gil — Taslitzky relationship: months of immense creativity. The letters she sent to her cousin Victor Egan, from 1931 to 1935, were obviously discreet.16 Later, in India, her parents’ made the devastating decision to burn old love letters: ‘letters which should not have been left about by you, as they are of no use but of possible harm….’17

When finally Amrita re-appeared at the Beaux-Arts, Boris says he abandoned the model to paint studio views, so he could focus on angles where he could see her. He gave up his walks along the banks of the Seine with artist friends to walk with her. One imagines his delight in the vivacity of her spoken French with its Indian inflections and Hungarian musicality, in the stories and fantasies imbricated in each part of her past. The pleasure was reciprocal: ‘She loved hearing me speak and I spoke without stopping. Love gave me ideas…. And it wasn’t a game for me but sacrosanct reality.’ He remembers the scenes that were not so blissful, when stretched out on a bed, her face showing through a mass of ebony hair she would laugh at him; call him ‘amusing’, ‘stupid’: ‘I could reduce you to nothing’…. There were moments when he hated her, fractious at her endless late arrivals, her bourgeois excuses; yet he was touched by her sweetness to his revered mother, who would bring them tea which they would drink sitting on cushions on the floor in his bedroom, often listening to records on her gramophone. ‘It’s so good here, I feel so

Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Man with Apples, 1932 Courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Amrita Sher-Gil, Madame Taslitzky, circa 1930 Courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Boris Taslitzky, Portrait of Madame Anna Rosenblum Taslitzky, 1934Image courtesy: Dr. Évelyne Taslitzky© 2015 Estate of Boris Taslitzky, Artists Rights Society, New York, NY

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Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Easel) detail, circa 1930 Image courtesy: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

Umrao Singh: the decision to leave Hungary for India in 1921 and the precarity of the family fortunes were directly implicated. Moreover the Sher-Gils’ arrival in Paris coincided with the impact of the Wall Street crash and world depression: the family lost significant investments.20 Spenglerian pessimism may have been chic (the ‘Decline of the West’ entailed a significant turn to the East), but in Paris and in the Paris art world, economic crisis entailed real misery. 21 Four students at the École des Beaux-Arts died of untreated tuberculosis in late 1929…22 Denise Proutaux with Indira, Amrita’s sister, was taking food to the starving Hungarian student Wittman during this period. The depression also accounted for the rise of anti-Semitic art criticism — sullying the glorious term ‘School of Paris’ — which neither Sher-Gil nor Taslitzky could have ignored.23 Both had been christened (and Amrita rechristened) despite their origins; both were avowed atheists — unusual in the Paris of their times.24 Amrita’s atheism must surely have impacted upon her attitude towards female eroticism and free sexual relationships in this era, in contrast with the fears of ‘pure’ Catholic girls from good French families.

Her most fiery portrait of Taslitzky certainly shows an unbridled empathy. He sits with uprolled sleeves, his dark, romantic locks framing a face with huge and limpid eyes, one in shadow. His full red lips are picked up by the modulated coral pinks, and browns of the background, blank like the backgrounds of David’s portraits, but energetically inscribed with modulated brushstrokes. The passion of the colouring contrasts with the melancholy gaze. His shirt with its high pointed open collar is the same that he wears in the group portrait with Lucien Simon,

Amrita Sher-Gil with her paintings at Rue Bassano, the family apartment. Image courtesy: Eric-Noël Dyvorne

Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled (Portrait of Boris Taslitzky), circa 1930. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Amrita Sher-Gil, Untitled (Self-Portrait), circa 1930. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

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of the medium. A dusky pink ground meets the lemon gilded frame of the dark green velvet chair. Amrita wears a black dress with transparent tulle sleeves; her necklace and earring add singing points of turquoise as does her ring; her hands are the folded and elongated hands of mannerist painting. Her gaze out of the picture is confident, for once quiet. This is an image full of curves and filled with desire — a desire not apparent, for example, in the dark and decorous portrait with Indian jewellery of 1929 by Amrita’s former tutor and admirer at the Grand Chaumière, Pierre Vaillant.

Two drawings of Amrita in Taslitzky’s student portfolio offer proof of the artists sharing the same space, looking at each other in silence or in conversation, commenting on each other’s work. The deep knowledge of a person, far beyond a one-off photographic likeness, is the very essence of portraiture: the logic was not merely one of economics and good fun (Yves Brayer also painted Amrita; mutual portraits were likewise exchanged between Taslitzky and his best friend Jean Amblard). A three-quarters profile drawing shows Amrita sporting the well-loved beret, her hair drawn back; its fine-lined delicacy aspires to Ingres or rather Chasseriau, in the sharp delineation of the mouth and eyes.26 The larger drawing shows Amrita painting at her easel, with almost knitted brows: a rapt moment of concentration. The view is unusually from above.

Boris Taslitzky, Portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil, Gouache on paperImage courtesy: Dr. Évelyne Taslitzky

© 2015 Estate of Boris Taslitzky, Artists Rights Society, New York, NY

where he is already the poseur, standing protectively behind Amrita, his arm in front of the shoulder of the naked — and nonplussed — black model of her lost canvas, La negresse.25

A second portrait of 1930 with a green background is more disconcerting. Like Amrita’s recently-discovered self-portrait, it is painted almost in profile. Here Boris’s features, the fleshy nose and lips, seem exaggerated; the huge right hand grasps paintbrushes as symbolic attributes, not working tools; the left is obscured by his palette. His gaze is distant; is he discomfited by this artificial pose? Were these profile-based experiments an exercise set by Lucien Simon?

Reciprocally, Taslitzky’s large painting of Amrita in watercolour and gouache is perhaps the most beautiful portrait of his whole career, with its uncharacteristic looseness of handling, the allegresse of execution. The audacious colour profits from an almost back-lit intensity, resulting from the transparency

“When Amrita was travelling, the letters she would send Boris were cool. His were incendiary…”

Boris Taslitzky, Untitled (Drawing of Amrita Sher-Gil)Image courtesy: Dr. Évelyne Taslitzky© 2015 Estate of Boris Taslitzky, Artists Rights Society, New York, NY

Boris Taslitzky, Untitled (Drawing of Amrita Sher-Gil)Image courtesy: Dr. Évelyne Taslitzky© 2015 Estate of Boris Taslitzky, Artists Rights Society, New York, NY

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your head and your heart to agree…. Look at the portrait you’re doing of me. Is that a portrait by someone who’s in love? I’ve got no real head in that figure, nothing but a tonal relationship, and it’s not good between the blue of the cape and the red of the mouth. You can deceive yourself, lie to yourself and believe you love me, but painting, painting always tells the truth.’27 The smaller painting of Amrita with its petrol-blue background does indeed appear troubled on the part of the sitter, and tightly controlled on the part of the artist. She wears the same white beret at the back of her head as in a joyous self-portrait with an oversize white fur…. Amrita looks tense: we can make out the down over her upper lip that caused her much concern. Was the friendship indeed in jeopardy?

When Amrita was travelling, the letters she would send Boris were cool. His were incendiary; she left them lying around in the family apartment, rue Bassano, where their terms of endearment caused a scandal… Taslitzky recounts how Marie-Antoinette insisted on inspecting her daughter’s artist-suitor. (Should he come with a bouquet? Kiss her mother’s hand? What form of address should he use?) He found Immortal’s mother tall, elegant, with the most violently-coloured hennaed hair, opulent…. a European! ‘But it’s true, Immortal, he’s very handsome’ she said. Teased for being Russian yet not speaking the language (he was French, he declared ferociously) Boris decided that Amrita’s Indian father, in his simplicity, made a better impression. The servants announced other guests: Italian writers, German musicians, Hungarian singers… he discussed politics with a Romanian sculptor.28

The relationship would sadly end. Taslitzky describes a final exchange (confusing the arrival of Amrita’s trial fiancé, Yosuf Ali Khan in mid-1931, with her blond Hungarian cousin). ‘Embrace me like a friend, like your sister. …No! Go! Take your portrait with you. No grudges, but I don’t love you as a friend, I love you as Immortal. I can’t help it’ he says.29 He returns to the École des Beaux-Arts; all appetite for painting has left him. Amrita’s haunting presence evokes both desire and pain. Amrita’s departure to share a studio with Marie-Louise Chassany in 1932, and the soothing turn to girlfriends — however fashionable — also signifies, surely, a reluctance to return to Lucien Simon’s studio, fraught with memories.30

Taslitzky’s reminiscences end with the promise of the International Colonial Exhibition. This huge display of power and economic affiliations paraded under the guise of ‘native’ pavilions in national and local styles (their hollow interiors full of exhibits and statistics). It was designed, however, almost entirely by French artists and architects. Lucien Simon received a commission for the Catholic Missions Pavilion, presumably in 1930. He surely discussed his subject with Amrita: the Jesuit, Saint François Xavier, preaching to the ‘heathen’ in Southern India.31 Despite the lure of new discoveries and the reconstruction of the almighty Temple of Anghkor, how could Amrita — or Umrao Singh and his network of French Indologists — have resisted the Pavilion of French India, its entrance

Taslitzky emphasises the shock of unbound hair falling asymmetrically on her shoulders (her right arm is raised) rebuffing any neo-classical echoes — he keeps the rest of the drawing as the merest sketch. Inevitably one recalls the history of women artists at the easel..., from Angelica Kauffman to Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the contemporary of David, whose work Amrita would have admired at the Louvre. Yet in contrast to their accomplished poise, her own self portrait with easel on red ground has an intensely troubling stare; a great right hand misplaced disrupts her classical pose. Amrita paints herself with long hair when she is at her happiest, most sensual (the laughing self-portraits in saris and bracelets of 1930) or with hair severely parted and drawn back and controlled; to maintain these possibilities of mood and masquerade she would never adopt the more feminist short crop of la garçonne like her sister Indira.

Later, Taslitzky describes working on the portrait of Amrita, when a fellow female student, ‘Aline’ calls in and grasps the situation immediately, much to Amrita’s jealousy: ‘You’re making a mistake Igor, I think you’ll never get

Edna L. Nicoll, A travers l’Exposition Coloniale, Paris, 1931

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vivid recollections of the melancholic Portrait of Boris with its blank, grey ground to the consumptive Professional Model. Amrita adopted this flatter, more modern style as a deliberately competitive gesture I would argue. She would also have been envious of the success of Boris and of the precociously talented Francis Gruber — a specialist in melancholic female sitters — at the Salon des Tuileries of 1933.35 Denise recalls Amrita’s spectacular presence at the 1934 vernissage in her sari, and the retreat together with Gruber, Robert Humblot and Georges Rohner, to a café where they took a happy photograph.

Amrita’s return to India was inevitable; the crisis and political situation in Paris became worse — positively violent: Taslitzky had started drawing riot scenes on the streets. ‘Poor Boris’, Amrita says in a letter obliquely referring to these events.36 Their atelier comrades, Humblot and Rohner would soon became part of the politicised group Forces Nouvelles.37 Amrita’s Self-portrait as a Tahitian, marks her adieu. The very concept of self-portraiture changes: Amrita now reinscribes herself as nude model (not as ‘portrait subject’) within a critical relationship to the greatest ‘exoticist’ of early modern painting: Paul Gauguin. She saw Faa Iheihe — the Tahitian Pastorale, 1898, in London’s National Gallery, but surely also the Courtauld Insitute’s Te Rerioa — The Dream, 1897, with its interior frescos behind the figures. Her similar background quotation of Chinese pictures from her studio was an act of cultural eclecticism as well as homage.38 An inexplicable

“Amrita’s eyes hold the velvety depths that her admirer, Boris Taslitzky first perceived, with a glint of the present.”

Boris Taslitzky in his Paris studio, holding a portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil painted by him. Image published in Y. Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life, 2006. Courtesy of Penguin Books

Boris Taslitzky, Untitled (Portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil)Image courtesy: Dr. Évelyne Taslitzky© 2015 Estate of Boris Taslitzky, Artists Rights Society, New York, NY

Photograph of Amrita Sher-Gil, Denise Proutaux and her sister Indira. Image courtesy: Eric-Noël Dyvorne

Francis Gruber, L’annonce de l’Hiver, 1935FNAC 14143. Centre national des arts plastiques © ADAGP, Paris/CNAP© 2015 Estate of Francis Gruber, Artists Rights Society, New York, NY

flanked by two splendidly harnessed and decorated elephants sculpted by Jean Magron, a member of the Jury of the École des Beaux-Arts? The abundant mural commissions over the whole Exhibition site with their orientalised subjects were flattened and frieze-like: Amrita would need four more years to abandon the modulated conception of space in her academically-inspired oil painting.

Following her successes in 1932 and 1933 such as the contrasting Young Girls (the dark Indira and the blonde Denise — Amrita at her most Venetian) or the superb nude of Indira, Sleep, (a new formal daring in composition and colour, the white ground, dark body exposed diagonally, the passage from her hair into the dragon motif on pink shawl) Amrita’s personal triumph was to exhibit at the Salon des Tuileries in 1934.32 She included Young Man with Apples or Portrait of Boris, usually dated ‘c. 1932’, but 1934 by her friend and witness, Denise Proutaux. 33 Contact continued, then, despite Taslitzky’s marriage to Jacqueline Lefèvre in March, 1932: Amrita encouraged Indira in a letter to visit Boris and his ‘newly acquired family’ in October.34 The portrait relates so evidently to her formal Still Life (also ‘c. 1932’), a study of Cézannesque drapery with apples tipped up onto an almost vertical plane. Denise remarks upon her change of style at this period: plus rude, plus dépouillé (more direct, more simplified). She links

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I am furious at this stupid little Madame Hutwak. I hate her ways of boasting about herself and above all when she boasts about ridiculous things.

You really should have guessed the true origin of my poetic inspirations – only because you’re a smart (not to say “wicked” !!) little thing.

I remember that when I used to write to her I would stop after having written the conventional formalities – my brow furrowed with despair searching in my mind for something to fill the blank page. And I said to Indu “What do you want me to write to her?” I have absolutely nothing – but nothing to tell her! And suddenly, like a flash, I saw the solution to the problem, a solution that I found all the more à propos as I was absolutely sure that it would work out!

I recommend you use it too, Denise, an easy and agreable solution that creates the maximum effect, with minimum trouble!)

Boris’ story is terrible – He didn’t deserve it – one of those rare human beings who did not deserve it…..)

But that stupid little woman will regret it one day – when it will be too late. That’s how it will be – I know it for sure. But I won’t talk about it anymore, it’s too painful for me.

Indu is asking me to beg you not to say anything to Wittman about Edith’s brother.

(She is back in Paris – Edith. I don’t know what’s become of her. She never writes to me. She says she is very busy, preparing the first session of her concert series.) Anyway I feel that I ‘m getting inextricably tied up in the French language – so I’ll stop.

Amrita Sher-Gil, letter to Denise Proutaux, written from Hungary, 1933 Image courtesy Eric-Noël Dyvorne

Ingstad is a little masochist (in his own way however surprising this might sound to you).

The other day we found a graphologist who said your handwriting is like mine, but is more “comme il faut” Ha Ha !

Love Amri

My dear Denise,

It was very chic of you to take care of Wittman to such an extent, continue your charitable actions by completing another commission.

It was stupid of Marie-Louise to have double-locked the door, but well we can’t do anything about it now. It will probably take less time if you go to our place, preferably in the morning

because Mama is not in Paris and with my father one never knows. But Ilona the maid is always there in the morning between 11am and noon. Go to our house and take my own key which you will find in the drawer of my bedside table next to my bed. I don’t exactly know what this is called. This is why I am offering you the opportunity to make a fortune (one fine day) with an authentic drawing by Amrita Sher-Gil the mysterious little Hindu princess who is well on the way to becoming a great painter and will indeed one day. (You will have to wait a long time, so cheer up!).

The key is a very thin key – there are 2 or 3 of these in the drawer. The key will probably be there, if not, then you can search in the dressing table (the drawer on the right). Tell the maid to search for it too. I am sending you a little word for her here.

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the future from the cover of the catalogue. The exhibition was one of several inspirational precursors for the epoch-making show Magiciens de la Terre in 1989.43 With Partage d’exotismes in 2000, curator Jean-Hubert Martin coined a title for the millennium and his sequel show far more open to the twists of history, geographies and the myriad inscriptions of desire. It is more accurate, used retrospectively, to discuss the indophile worlds of 1930s Hungary and France. The games of insider and outsider, languages, costumes and fancy dress, attractions, empathies, differences and loss come together in this phrase where ‘exoticism’ is performed and shared, where politics and love are not excluded. The genesis and destiny of Amrita’s paintings themselves now housed in Paris, Budapest or in Delhi make this clear. Portraiture and self-portraiture, mind and hand, the reciprocal gaze, the knowledge of touch, the response to mood, the love present, the portrait as promise, as memory or as parting shot — all these elements are contained in the 1931 Self-Portrait, once cherished by Boris Taslitzky, which we are now privileged to rediscover.

Page from the popular magazine L’Illustration, 1938

“This anonymous ‘high-caste young hindou girl’ was simultaneously presented as ‘Amrita Sher-Gill, the celebrated woman painter of India whose artistic education was undertaken in France.”

looming shadow and her gaze ‘out of time’ seem to presage a new destiny.

In 1938, Taslitzky was surely shocked to discover Amrita erupting mysteriously on Parisian news-stalls, as cover-girl of the popular magazine L’Illustration; this anonymous ‘high-caste young hindou girl’ was simultaneously presented as ‘Amrita Sher-Gill, the celebrated woman painter of India whose artistic education was undertaken in France’. She was photographed in an elaborate sari in her studio; Brahmacharis, the painting of five semi-naked Indian devotees, clothed in white dhotis, stood on her easel.39 With her new life her art had radically changed.

Self-portrait as a Tahitian, now performs as cover girl for ‘twentieth–century Indian art’.40 The rewriting of Indian art history for a globalised era first challenged models of centre and periphery. Subsequently ‘multiple modernisms’, ‘global indigenous modernisms’ ‘plural modernities’ , translocal, contextual, even ‘planetary’ modernisms have proliferated as hold-all terms.41 The Sher-Gil family were part of the internationally mobile intelligentsia of an undivided Europe and unpartitioned India; they would find these appellations condescending. The word modernisme was never used in 1930s Paris to describe the prolix contemporary art scene.

Far richer is the concept of a partage d’exotismes. After his long career as Resistance hero, grand déporté, artist and writer, Taslitzky was able to assess Amrita’s lifetime achievement in 1985.42 He lent Amrita’s Self-Portrait to a festival show of Indian artists in France; she looks to

Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian, 1934 Image courtesy: Vivan Sundaram

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“The games of insider and outsider, languages, costumes and fancy dress, attractions, empathies, differences and loss come together in this phrase where ‘exoticism’ is performed and shared, where politics and love are not excluded. The genesis and destiny of Amrita’s paintings themselves now housed in Paris, Budapest or in Delhi make this clear.”

The cover of the catalogue, Artistes indiens en France, 1985a

Amrita Sher-GilCourtesy of the Sher-Gil Family Archive, Budapest

27

33 Denise Dyvorne, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil, premier peintre moderne d’Inde’, Nouvelles d’Inde, 251, August 1985, p. 30. Elaborating from her pioneering article on Amrita of 1933, this is the first witnessed account of early 1934, the date she gives to the Boris portrait. See also Vivan Sundaram, ‘Young Man with Apples’, Art India, vol. 6, issue 4, 2001, pp. 80- (dating 1932, he confirms by extensive e-mail, 24 August 2015). His article coincided with the Ernst Museum Sher-Gil show and Taslitzky’s major retrospective at the French Communist Party headquarters, Paris).

34 Sundaram, vol. 1, p. 99, letter from Budapest of October 1932.

35 Francis Gruber had 10 submissions; Taslitzky sent four paintings including Maternité and Portrait de Jackye, from the ‘Caserne Bessières’ (he was doing his military service); XI Salon des Tuileries, Paris, 1933, pp. 48 and 106.

36 Thanks to Eric-Noël Dyvorne, for the scan of this important letter sent to his mother Denise in 1933, reproduced in Sundaram, vol. 1, pp. 109-111.

37 See Forces Nouvelles, Paris, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1980 (np.). Katalin Keresü’s in the catalogue for her magnificent show, Amrita Sher-Gil and Hungary (Balatonfüred, Vaszary Villa, 2013) Katalin Keresü emphasises the impact of these artists on Amrita; I would rather point to Gruber: see Francis Gruber, l’oeil à vif, Paris, Fage éditions, 2009.

38 Te Rerioa was visible in the Courtauld Institute collection, London; see her letter to Denise, mid July 1933, Sundaram, vol. 1, pp. 108-9.

39 Paul Coze, ‘Aux Indes de Kipling’, L’Illustration, 25 June 1938, p. 282 and cover; see Sundaram, vol. 1, pp. 387-8 for Paul-Jean Coze Dabija.

40 See Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, Rakhee Balaram eds. Twentieth Century Indian Art, Milan, Skira, 2014 (cover).

41 See for example the conference ‘Global Indigenous Modernisms: Primitivism, Artists, Mentors’ ( 6 – 7 May 2011, Massauchusetts, USA); Modernités Plurielles de 1905-1970, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2013 or the website http://multiplemodernisms.org/

42 Taslitzky’s status as a Buchenwald survivor and history painter is discussed in Sarah Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France, Liverpool University Press, 2013.

43 The catalogue Artistes Indiens en France (Michel Troche ed., with an essay on Amrita by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Paris, CNAC, 1985) was displayed in the recent commemorative show: see Jean-Hubert Martin et al., Magiciens de la Terre, retour sur une exposition légendaire, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2014.

44 Jean-Hubert Martin, Thierry Raspail eds. Partage d’exotismes, Fifth Biennale de Lyon, Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000, 2 vols. (Sher-Gil did not feature in Magiciens de la terre, 1989 or here).

Amrita Sher-GilCourtesy of the Sher-Gil Family Archive, Budapest

15 Sundaram vol. 1, pp. 55, 57.

16 Extracts appear in Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil, A Life, New Delhi, Penguin Books India, 2006, pp. 45-53.

17 Ibid., vol. II, exchanges between Umrao Singh and Amrita, pp. 513-515.

18 Tu parles!, pp. 195-6.

19 Tu parles!, pp. 56-58, p. 196.

20 Sundaram, see vol. I, p. 112, for Umrao’s brother Sunder Singh Majithia’s interests in sugar, his business and political profiles, and for loss in the crash, p. 146.

21 See André Fauconnet, Oswald Spengler: le prophète du declin de l’Occident, Paris, Alcan, 1925. Adolphe Basler’s Le cafard après la fête, ou l’ésthétisme aujourd’hui, Paris, Jean Budry, 1929, heralded the years of crisis in ‘hangover’ mode.

22 See Schwarz, XU Beihong, 2014, for tuberculosis at the École.

23 Camille Mauclair’s compilation of articles, La farce de l’art vivant, was followed by Les Métèques contre l’art français (The farce of contemporary art / ‘Foreign trash’ against French art) Paris, Éditions de la Nouvelle Critique, 1929 and 1930.

24 For Taslitzky’s accidental baptism (his mother, grand-daughter of a rabbi spoke only Yiddish) see Tu parles!, p. 19. Amrita Dalma (baptised Amrita Antonia) was rechristened Maria-Magdolna; see Sundaram vol. 1, p. xxxvi.

25 I use the period appellation : cf. Brown Girl, Sundaram ed., vol I., p. 140.

26 See Chasseriau, 1819-1856, Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, 1933, also translated in V. Sundaram.

27 Tu parles!, p. 201; he seized her by the shoulders and shook her with rage….

28 Ibid., pp. 198- 200. Denise Dyvorne (née Proutaux) later recalled Baldoon Dhingra and the eccentrically dressed Raymond Duncan, brother of dancer Isidora amongst the glitterati at these soirées.

29 Taslitzky mixes chronologies here (Tu parles!, p. 202); Amrita marries her blond cousin, Viktor Egan in 1938.

30 See Paula J. Birnbaum, ‘Painting the Perverse’, in Women Artists in Interwar France, Framing Femininities, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, p. 189, ff. and Tirza True Latimer, Women together Women apart. Portraits of Lesbian Paris, New Brunswick, N. J. Rutgers University Press, 2005.

31 The Exposition Coloniale ran from 6 May to 15 November 1931. The Catholic Missions pavilion commissions were given by Maurice Denis. Paul Tournon’s pavilion with murals intact was reconstructed as Nôtre-Dame-des-Missions, Épinay-sur-Seine.

32 See ‘Établissements français dans l’Inde’, in Edna L. Nicoll, À travers l’Exposition Coloniale, Paris, 1931, pp.157-8, architects Girves and Sors, frescos by P-J.Poitevin and Henri Montassier. Pondicherry (Puducherry) was French-controlled from 1674 to 1954.

1 Amrita speaking in Boris Taslitzky’s Tu parles!, Paris, Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1959; all translations are by the author.

2 The nineteen-year-old Maharaja was depicted in evening dress in Paris by Bernard Boutet de Monvel in 1929 and photographed by Man Ray.

3 Umrao Singh followed France’s greatest Orientalist Sylvain Lévi at the Sorbonne; Joseph Hackin, Gaston Migeon, Louis de la Vallée Poussin and ‘Black Violet’, Raymonde Linossier, were publishing; the young André Malraux was exhibiting Lévi, Oeuvres indo-helleniques at the Galerie de la Nouvelle Revue Française in 1931.

4 See Exposition de dessins et aquarelles de Rabindranath-Tagore organisée par les service d’art du théâtre Pigalle, Paris, Pigalle, May, 1930; and Umrao Singh, ‘Some Reminiscences of Amrita’, Usha Journal of Art and Literature, vol. III, August, 1942, No.II, pp. 77-89. See Deepak Ananth’s ‘An Unfinished Project,’ Amrita Sher-Gil, Munich, Schirmer/Mosel (Tate retrospective) 2007, pp. 26-8; he proposes that Tagore and Sher-Gil present ‘a third, protomodernist movement’ in India.

5 See Emmanuel Schwarz, ‘L’École des Beaux-Arts dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Un mâitre et ses mâitres, XU Beihong et la peinture académique française, Shanghai, Shanghai Culture and Art Cinquini Development, 2014 (Beijing, Henan, Shanghai, 2014-2015), pp. 20-26, and Taslitzky, Tu parles!, 1959, p. 156.

6 XU Beihong, ibid ., cat 18, Nu féminin, 1930, pp. 92-3.

7 See (with Schwarz) Paul Landowski et al., L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, La Grande Masse, 1937, for the liveliest illustrated account of the school in Amrita’s times.

8 Emmanuel Schwarz, XU Beihong, 2014.

9 Simon was elected to the Academy of the Beaux-Arts, and appointed officer of the Légion d’Honneur by 1876: Cabanel, Bougereau, Moreau were contemporaries. Louis Süe designed his magnificent town-house cum atelier in 1906. He was a corrector at the Grande Chaumière before moving to the École. See André Cariou, Lucien Simon, Plomelin, Éditions Palantines, 2002.

10 ‘Sheir-Gil/ AJ 52-248 / Atelier Lucien Simon / p. 178, No 943, 1929, Adresse dans le 16e, Rue Philibert’ (with thanks to Emmanuel Schwarz).

11 See letters of May 1932 for the concours du portrait; of June 1932 for the concours de nu and the concours d’esquisse, and August 1932 for the concours de travaux de vacances; Vivan Sundaram, ed. Amrita Sher-Gil, a self-portrait in letters & writings, New Delhi, Tulika Books, 2010, vol. I, pp. 67, 75, 77-9 and 87.

12 No scholars, discussing Gauguin and Amrita ever make reference to the powerful neo-impressionist movement in Hungary (József Rippl-Rónai and friends): see Tamas Kieselbach, Modern Hungarian Painting, 1892-1919, Budapest, Kieselbach Gallery, 2003.

13 Centenaire du romantisme; exposition E. Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, June-July, 1930, preface by Paul Jamot.

14 Boris Taslitzky, Tu parles!, pp. 177-8. Aimed at a Communist-affiliated readership, Tu parles!, a fascinating record of his artistic education, pointedly mixes learned references with the idioms and slang of the streets (‘agitators’ translates as emmerdeurs).

ENDNOTES

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SARAH WILSON

Sarah Wilson is professor of modern and contemporary art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. From her earliest days in Paris working for the Centre Georges Pompidou, Boris Taslitzky was an important mentor. The album of his drawings made in Buchenwald has always featured in her teaching. She exhibited his work in Aftermath: France, New Images of Man, (Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1982) and Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968 (Royal Academy of Arts, London; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2002); and written on his Holocaust-related works and colonial critiques in Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France, (Liverpool University Press, 2013). She was awarded the AICA International award for disitnguished art criticism in 2015.

She was struck by Amrita Sher-Gil’s Ancient Story Teller in Six Indian Painters, at London’s Tate Gallery in 1982, long before Taslitzky gave her Tu parles! and revealed their relationship. Following Tastlizky’s death, she invited his daughter Evelyne to the Tate Modern’s Amrita Sher-Gil retrospective, where Courtauld alumnus Deepak Ananth’s essay anticipated the revelations of her published letters. Amrita’s nephew, Vivan Sundaram, was invited to the Courtauld Institute for a special centenary celebration and conference devoted to Amrita in May 2010, to celebrate his two-volume publication of her letters. Gabor Einspach invited Sarah Wilson to Hungary, where the Sher-Gil scholar Katalin Keserü took her to the revealing exhibition she curated by Lake Balaton, with its sacred grove devoted to Rabindranath Tagore, following her pioneering retrospective of 2001.

Sarah Wilson’s collaborator and complice, Adrien Sina, was responsible for digitally restoring Taslitzky’s drawings of Amrita and introduced her to Eric Dyvorne, who sent precious scans of Amrita’s letter to his mother Denise. With Emmanuel Schwarz, keeper of the École des Beaux-Arts’ traditions and treasures, she visited the heirs of Lucien Simon and thanks Martin Boyer for sending the portrait of his father. Didier Schulmann at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou was as indispensable as ever. Yashodhara Dalmia provided insights on the dating of Sher-Gil’s works at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. The Sher-Gil Family Archives, Budapest, proved invaluable for bringing Amrita’s vivacious personality to life.

Both Amrita Sher-Gil and Boris Taslitzky have a magical posthumous gift: they generate ever-widening circles of friendship.

See www.sarah-wilson.londonAmrita Sher-Gil

Courtesy of the Sher-Gil Family Archive, Budapest

BIOGRAPHY

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PROPERTY FROM THE FAMILY COLLECTION OF BORIS TASLITZKY

AMRITA SHER-GIL1913 - 1941

Untitled (Self-Portrait)

Oil on canvasSigned and dated ‘A. Sher-Gil / 31’ lower right and further inscribed by Boris Taslitzky ‘AMRITA SHER-GIL / auto-portrait / 1931 / col. Boris TASLITZKY’ on reverse55 x 46 cm. (21⅝ x 18⅛ in.)Painted in 1931

PROVENANCE

Gifted to Boris Taslitzky by the artist circa 1931Thence by descent

LITERATURE

V. Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, A Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, volume 2, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2010, illustration p. 798

£ 1,500,000-2,000,000 US$ 2,340,000-3,120,000

LOT 18