Born in 1913 to a Hungarian-Jewish mother and Indian Jat Sikh father in Budapest, Sher-Gil grew up in a household where her talent for art was celebrated and nurtured. At a young age, the family left Hungary for India, where she lived a life of relative privilege and practiced her art, as well as learned to play piano and violin.
In the 1920s and into the 1930s, Sher-Gil lived and traveled in Italy and later Paris, where she was deeply moved and influenced by the works of Gaughin, Modigliani, and Cezanne.
Sher-Gil was definitely influenced by the art scenes of her day, and even won a gold medal for her painting Young Girls in her late teens and became an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris (the youngest member ever and the only Asian to ever receive the honor). Though moved by European masters, Sher-Gil famously wrote in a letter to her friend, “I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque…India belongs only to me.” It was at this stage in her life that she returned to India and began demonstrating far more influence from the “Calcutta Group” of artists, who were dominating the Indian art scene of the day.
As the rumblings of independence from Britain rang in India, Sher-Gil showed support for the Indian Congress and was commissioned within India to paint, which made her known in both political and artistic circles; She even exchanged personal letters with Nehru, who later became the first Prime Minister of India (though these letters were burned by her parents when she married Viktor Egan in Europe in 1938).
Throughout her life, Sher-Gil wrote letters to and had relationships with many men and women, and one of her pieces, Two Women, was believed to have been a portrait of her and her then-lover, Marie Louise.
Just before the opening of her first show in Lahore at the age of 28, Sher-Gil became ill and slipped into a coma, dying shortly thereafter. The cause of her death has never been definitively proven, but it has been said that the possible cause could have been a failed abortion which led to peritonitis.
She has been called one of the greatest avant-garde female artists of the 20th century for the breadth and depth of her work, all completed at such a young age.
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Legends of Pride 