Amrita Sher-Gil was a Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century" and a "pioneer" in modern Indian art.
She was born on January 30th, 1913 in Budapest, Hungary. Her father was an Indian Punjabi Sikh and her mother was a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer who came from an affluent bourgeois family. She spent most of her early childhood in Budapest. In 1921 her family moved to India where she would give violin and piano concerts with her sister and she began to study painting. She would continue to travel between Europe and India studying painting.
Sher-Gil had an exciting love life. She had a relationship with fellow painter Boris Taslitzky, was briefly engaged to Yussuf Ali Khan while probably also having an affair with her future husband Victor Egan.
In a 1934 letter to her mother, she wrote,
Knowing how unprejudiced, objective and intelligent you are, I am going to be very frank with you. I confess that I also think as you do about the disadvantages of relationships with men. But since I need to relieve my sexuality physically somehow (because I think it is impossible to spiritualise, idealise sexuality completely in art, and channelising it through art for a lifetime is impossible, only a stupid superstition invented for the brainless). So I thought I would start a relationship with a woman when the opportunity arises.
It seems that her mother was unconvinced by this logic, as she is rumored to have destroyed Sher-Gil's letters referring to her many lovers, both men and women.
Amrita Sher-Gil died suddenly at the age of 28 days before the opening of her first major solo show in Lahore. She left behind a prolific body of work and has since been recognized as an enormously important and influential painter. Her work is deemed to be so important to Indian culture that when it is sold in India, the Indian government has stipulated that the art must stay in the country.