Behind Sher-Gil's 'Tahitian' Saloni Mathur, a UCLA art
historian, reconsiders the career of Amrita Sher-Gil with
reference to Gauguin and Van Gogh, putting modernist painting in
a global frame. How could art history have missed this painting?
“Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others.
India belongs only to me,” declared Amrita Sher-Gil, the
Hungarian-Indian painter who died mysteriously in 1941 at the
age of 28. In a lecture sponsored by the Center for India and
South Asia, UCLA Associate Professor of Art History Saloni
Mathur explored the legacy of this biracial, bicultural and
bisexual artist through the lens of one of her less-examined
pieces, “Self-Portrait as Tahitian" (1934), which overtly
references the French painter Paul Gauguin. Best known for
paintings of recognizably Indian subjects, particularly her
“dark-bodied, sad-faced” peasant women, Sher-Gil made much of
her formal study of painting in Paris during the height of
modernism. So, although the influence of Gauguin is easy to e