Amrita Sher- Gil was born January 1913, in Budapest, to parents of Hungarian and Indian decent. Two separate cultural backgrounds gave Sher-Gil a different view of the world when it came to her paintings and how she perceived art. Instead of studying at the Bengal School of Art she trained in Paris, where she attended the Ecole des Beaux- Art from 1929- 1932 (516). Studying in Paris gave Sher- Gil insight into the traditions and concepts of old masters like Paul Gauguin and Vincent von Gogh. In 1934 Sher- Gil painted, Self- Tahitian, which portrayed her with straight black hair in a sleek ponytail, bare breasted, and most importantly showing her form of Tahitianness in her physical brown body. A rare mixture of modernism with a touch of
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Amrita Sher- Gil plays with the aesthetic strategies of cross cultural references towards race in, Self-Portrait as Tahitian, 1934, showing heavy influences she obtained from the fascination with Vincent von Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Sher- Gil like, both European scholars before her, strived to cultivate an image of herself as an artist while trying to negotiate her relationship beyond training in Paris but through her own personal experiences of social displacement and difference because of her European and Indian decent.
Masquerading was the particular act that peaked Sher- Gils interest, by also displaying this aesthetic from the masters through her own art. Sher- Gils pointing out that von Gogh was the greatest master out of the two. Vincent van Gogh had a large emotional and intellectual appeal to Sher- Gil because of his malleable, contingent, relational, and dialogical artistic identity in other words his relational ego (535). The hunting late work by Vinvon Gogh, Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, showing his vulnerability that Sher-Gil fell in love with because, of the painter revealing his true painful self and not hiding behind any masquerades. The reading from Saloni Mathur, A Retake of Sher-Gil's Self-Portrait as Tahitian, had proposed that van Gogh dialogical and fragile ethical vision was the inspiration to Sher- Gils taking it personally and aesthetically in her own artistry. Sher- Gils took these qualities and tied them to her ambitious technique of interpreting the life of the Indian culture, especially the status of the poor Indians that usually wouldn’t be pictorially tasteful to most
Amrita Sher- Gil plays with the aesthetic strategies of cross cultural references towards race in, Self-Portrait as Tahitian, 1934, showing heavy influences she obtained from the fascination with Vincent von Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Sher- Gil like, both European scholars before her, strived to cultivate an image of herself as an artist while trying to negotiate her relationship beyond training in Paris but through her own personal experiences of social displacement and difference because of her European and Indian decent.
Masquerading was the particular act that peaked Sher- Gils interest, by also displaying this aesthetic from the masters through her own art. Sher- Gils pointing out that von Gogh was the greatest master out of the two. Vincent van Gogh had a large emotional and intellectual appeal to Sher- Gil because of his malleable, contingent, relational, and dialogical artistic identity in other words his relational ego (535). The hunting late work by Vinvon Gogh, Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, showing his vulnerability that Sher-Gil fell in love with because, of the painter revealing his true painful self and not hiding behind any masquerades. The reading from Saloni Mathur, A Retake of Sher-Gil's Self-Portrait as Tahitian, had proposed that van Gogh dialogical and fragile ethical vision was the inspiration to Sher- Gils taking it personally and aesthetically in her own artistry. Sher- Gils took these qualities and tied them to her ambitious technique of interpreting the life of the Indian culture, especially the status of the poor Indians that usually wouldn’t be pictorially tasteful to most