Amrita Shergill, Nudes and Art

When I was younger, I did have some talent as a artist.In those days I painted a lot, but my father was vehemently opposed to any study of art and so I fell in line with him and achieved a conventional degree and carried on in life. Still two or three of my paintings remain as a reminder to what I could have accomplished. Anyway that is old hat now, but my interest in art did not diminish and recently I spent a considerable amount of time witnessing and studying the paintings of Amrita Shergill at the Museum at Delhi.
The paintings are absolutely stunning. The best part are some lovely nudes of herself which stand out in the collection. Who was Amrita Shergill ? Not many may be knowing that she was a Sikh girl who died young at the age of 28. Her short lifespan, however, is a beacon to modern Indian painters. Born in 1913 of a Hungarian mother and Sikh father in Hungary, she died of a mysterious illness at Lahore in 1941. I have reproduced one of her paintings to give a reader the visual of the type of painter she was.


Nudity , beauty, and women from centuries have gone hand in hand. However, It must be understood hat nudism per se is not art. But again most of the greats in the field of art have painted nudes as a form of self-expression.
The famous painting by Fransisco Goya of his love for the Duchess of Alba led to one of the art's greatest paintings. it set the tone of the greats being painted in the nude for posterity. As a follow-up, Brittany Spears got herself painted in the nude in this century so as to leave her image behind for posterity.
Coming to Amrita Shergill, she was certainly a genius and achieved more than painters in a lifetime. Her paintings are raw and earthy and conform to the fact that a nude is Gods most wonderful creation. Her self-portraits in the nude are there for posterity as a tribute to her skill and spirit. That is perhaps the reason the ancients in India and Greece painted and sculpted nude women. Lastly, we must remember that a nude is a creative form of expression and perhaps an erotic woman's painting is the ultimate in creativity.
I feel sad that Amrita died so young.One wonders what she could have achieved in a lifetime, but then God has his own peculiar way of running the world.