Top 15 Amrita Sher-Gil Quotes

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.

It is dreadful to think of Paris in German hands but what preoccupies me still more is what is going to happen to modern French art and the younger artists.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

She was very fair and there was an expression of weariness in the lovely liquid dark eyes. Her little finely curved and red hued lips seemed like drooping rosebuds and were sealed as if it were in silence eternal....she seemed as if she guessed the cruel fate which had been meted out for her by the Rani and Rajah and her other rich but distant relations in whose hands she seemed a helpless toy.

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.

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

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.

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.