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Portrait of an artist
Should museums be content with presenting only readymade art
blockbusters, or can we still organise ambitious, well-researched
shows that influence thinking in a way that it can even rewrite art
history? This exhibition in Munich provides the answer
 Not
only was Amrita Sher-Gil born in Europe to a Hungarian mother, she
also trained as a painter in Paris before returning to India in 1934
to create a series of canvases that marked the birth of modern
Indian art. Yet, this half-European painter remains largely unknown
in the West, ignored by art historians and museums, and with just a
mention in a dictionary of women artists.
This is about to change with the opening on Monday of a major
exhibition at the Haus der Kunst (House of Art) in
Munich, one of Germany’s leading modern art museums originally
created, ironically, to showcase Nazi art. The show, called ‘Amrita
Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist Family in the 20th Century’,
has been conceived by the museum’s curator Chris Dercon to include
not just Sher-Gil’s paintings but also the works of her father Umrao Singh, a pioneering photographer, and her nephew Vivan
Sundaram, an innovative contemporary artist.
“We want to tell the story of modernism in
India by focusing on three generations of a single family,” said
Dercon, who is also the Haus der Kunst director. “This show is
almost like fiction — so much cross-linked material, somany
inter-weavings. It is a varia tion on the theme of the
retrospective, and provides a picture of the changes that took place
across a whole century in India.” At the heart of the show are 45
oil paintings by Sher-Gil, on loan from New Delhi’s National Gallery
of Modern Art, the Vivan and Naveena Sundaram Collection, and the
works of a Hungarian nephew of the painter. The show is on till
January 7 next year.
“People who see Amrita’s work for the first time remark: this cannot
be true, this could not have all happened in one short lifetime,”
said Dercon. “What for a normal person happens in 60 years happened
to Amrita in 10 years. By the time of her premature death in 1941,
she had produced an oeuvre that is so small yet so condensed, so
congested, so intense.” What will be of special interest to European
viewers, said Dercon, is how an artist moulded by Western realism
went back to
India
and within a short span of time, transformed herself as a painter
under the influence of much older art traditions —
Ajanta
frescoes, Basohli, Pahari and Mughal miniatures, and
Cochin’s
Mattancherry Palace wall paintings.
Both Dercon and Sundaram believe that the
Munich show will test the growing awareness in the West of “multiple
modernisms”, of the fact that the modern art tradition — born in
Paris, propagated in Europe and taken over by the US — had a
different trajectory in non-Western societies.
The highlight show of the season, as a giant hoarding outside the
Haus der Kunst testifies, is also a risk Dercon is determined to
take. If the exhibition flops, the museum will invite criticism. But
then, as Sundaram said: “Dercon is a flamboyant man. If you do not
take risks as a museum director, you might as well be in charge of a
graveyard.” Dercon, who first made his name as a radical director of
a
Rotterdam
museum, clearly enjoys stirring things up. “We are doing the Sher-Gil
show as a challenge, not just for ourselves, but for everyone,” he
said. “The central issue in the West today is: should museums be
content with presenting only readymade art blockbusters, or can we
still organise ambitious, wellresearched shows that influence
thinking in a way that it can even rewrite art history?” The answer
has come even before the exhibition’s inauguration by Culture
Minister Ambika Soni: Tate Modern director Sir Nicholas Serrota
wants to exhibit Sher- Gil’s canvases at Britain’s premier museum
after the
Munich
show closes.
The Haus der Kunst show also breaks new ground with the photographs
of Sher-Gil’s father. Unlike early Indian photographers like Raja
Deen Dayal who received international attention, the eccentric
genius Umrao Singh has been hardly noticed. As his grandson,
Sundaram pointed out, Umrao Singh’s unique achievement was to skirt
the colonial project — photography as ethnography, clicking people,
tribes or maharajahs — and instead use the camera to “discourse with
the self ”.“The self-portrait is a dominant genre in painting, but
hardly to be seen in photography,” observed Sundaram, who has used
several of his grandfather’s pictures in his fascinating digital
reconstructions of Sher-Gil’s life and work. Umrao Singh left behind
600 self-portraits, along with portraits of his family, especially
older daughter Amrita. An entire section of the
Munich show is devoted to his work. “Europe is about to discover
Umrao Singh as a serious hotographer,” said Dercon.
4 October 2006
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