Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes

Revelations. Ellora magnificent. Ajanta curiously subtle and fascinating-I have for the first time since my return to India learnt something from somebody else's work.

Traditions that were once vital, sincere and splendid and which are now merely empty formulae, [nor to imitate fifth rate western art slavishly] break away from both and produce something vital, connected with the soil, something essentially Indian.

I am always in love, but unfortunately for the party concerned, I fall out of love or rather fall in love with someone else before any damage can be done.

Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me.

Towards the end of 1933 I began to be haunted by an intense longing to return to India, feeling in some strange inexplicable way that there lay my destiny as a painter.

The life of Indians, particularly the poor, pictorially....with a new technique, my own technique...and this technique though not technically Indian, in the traditional sense of the word, will yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit.

The Brahmacharis as the most difficult thing she had ever done....don't you think I have learnt something from Indian painting?...I don't know whether it is a passing phase or a durable change in my outlook but I see in a more detached manner, more ironically than I have ever done.

I shall in future be obliged to resign myself to exhibiting them (her paintings) merely at the Grand Salon, Paris, of which I happen to be an Associate and the Salon de Tuileries known all over the world as the representative exhibition of Modern Art, and to which I have been invited to participate in the past, a distinction I may add that few can boast of.

These little compositions are the expression of my happiness and that is why perhaps I am particularly fond of them.

Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musee Guimet is worth more than a whole Renaissance.'

I was positively stunned and have straightaway become a votary of Mathura art to the exclusion of all the other and later schools. I had some of the things in reproductions but never dreamt they were so magnificent. With the possible exception of Mahabalipuram I don’t think I have seen anything in Indian sculpture that I liked so much.

I was positively stunned and have straight away become a votary of Mathura art to the exclusion of all the other and later schools.

In "Toward a Development of a Cosmopolitan Aesthetic"

Amrita Sher-Gill: Art and Life: A Reader (page xvii)

...was to interpret the life of Indians and particularly the poor Indians, pictorially.