Amrita Sher-Gil Died at 28 in 1941, and a Notification of 1 December 1976 Made Her Paintings National Art Treasures That Need a Government Permit to Leave India

On 1 December 1976 the Central Government issued notification GSR 904(E), declaring the works of four artists to be art treasures under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972. The four were Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose, according to the Chambers and Partners practice guide on Indian cultural property law, which spells her name “Amrita Sher Gill”. Sher-Gil had been dead for almost 35 years. She died in Lahore on 5 December 1941, at 28.

What the notification rests on

The Act is Act 52 of 1972, passed on 9 September 1972. It came into force on 5 April 1976, so the notification came in the year the Act took effect. The text defines an art treasure as a human work of art that is not an antiquity and that the Central Government has declared, by notification in the Official Gazette, to be one “having regard to its artistic or aesthetic value”.

A proviso in the same clause bars any declaration while the author is alive. So every artist on the list had already died, and Sher-Gil, who died in 1941, could qualify in 1976 but could not have qualified in her lifetime.

A second notification, GSR 477(E) of 10 August 1979, added five more: Raja Ravi Varma, Gaganendranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Sailoz Mookherjea and Nicholas Roerich. Chambers and Hubbis both describe the nine as the Navratnas, the “nine jewels”. The Rabindranath Tagore on the 1976 list is the Nobel laureate covered in Tagore, the Nobel and the knighthood returned.

What the label restricts, and what it does not

Section 3 of the Act says nobody except the Central Government, or an authority or agency it authorises, may export an art treasure, and that any export must follow a permit issued by a prescribed authority. Chambers names that authority: “A specific permit from the Director General, Archaeological Survey of India is necessary before any exportation.”

The rule is about leaving the country. Hubbis states that the Act “does not impose any limitations and restrictions on the sale of art treasures within the country”, and that only export is regulated. It adds that the Government can compulsorily acquire a work if it decides the piece should be preserved in a public place. Some popular accounts, including an art-market profile on Masterworks, say her paintings cannot legally be exported at all. The statute’s wording is a permit requirement, and the practice guide reads it that way.

Budapest, Shimla and Paris

Sher-Gil was born in Budapest on 30 January 1913. Her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, was a Sikh aristocrat, and her mother, Marie Antoinette, was a Hungarian opera singer, according to the Delhi Art Gallery’s biography. The family sailed for India in January 1921, reached Bombay on 2 February and settled in Shimla, the hill town whose toy-train line from Kalka has its own article. She was taught at home there and won a first prize for art in 1923.

In 1929 her father sent her to Paris. The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) says she studied first with Pierre Vaillant at the Grande Chaumière and then with Lucien Simon at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Delhi Art Gallery dates the move to the Beaux-Arts to October 1929 and her departure from it to July 1933. It records that her Young Girls of 1932 won a gold medal at the Grand Salon in 1933 and that she was elected an associate member of the Société Nationale the same year, its youngest member and, in the gallery’s words, its first Asian one. Masterworks gives the same 1933 year for the medal and the associate membership.

The NGMA’s own account of that period names academic realism and post-Impressionism, with Gauguin singled out, as the influences on her early portraits, nude studies and self-portraits.

Group of Three Girls, painted after the return

She came back to India in December 1934 with her parents and stayed in Amritsar, the Delhi Art Gallery chronology says. Group of Three Girls is dated 1935. The NGMA’s catalogue entry says it was among the first works she made after returning from Europe, and that the flattened figures reflect Gauguin’s influence while the strong reds that mark her later work first appear in it.

Two details differ between sources. The NGMA entry gives 73.5 by 99.5 centimetres, which AstaGuru’s overview repeats. The NGMA also notes that the art historian Partha Mitter calls the picture The Three Women, while the catalogue “Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Artist Family of the Twentieth Century” uses Group of Three Girls. The Delhi Art Gallery and AstaGuru both say it won a gold medal at the Bombay Art Society’s annual exhibition in 1937. The Press Information Bureau’s January 2023 release lists a group of three girls first among her famous works.

Bride’s Toilet and the tour of the south

The Delhi Art Gallery chronology has her making a long tour of India in 1936, visiting Ajanta and Ellora, and painting her south Indian works in 1937. The Press Information Bureau release says her wide travel in India came in 1939, so the Press Information Bureau and the gallery chronology differ on the year of the travelling. Both agree that the journeys changed her style, with the PIB crediting them with a strong effect on her expression, figures and composition.

Bride’s Toilet, dated 1937, is oil on canvas, 146 by 88.8 centimetres, and is in the NGMA collection in New Delhi. The gallery calls it part of her south Indian trilogy and says it was “inspired by the classical tradition of the Ajanta murals”. Those murals belong to the cave complex described in Ajanta and Ellora, carved from rock. The NGMA says that after the southern tour her palette became saturated with intense reds, ochres, browns, yellows and greens, and that she drew on Indian miniature painting.

Village Scene, a work that changed hands

Not every Sher-Gil is on a museum wall. Village Scene is one of a series she painted while staying at her uncle’s estate at Saraya, in Gorakhpur district of Uttar Pradesh, according to Outlook, which reports that the Delhi-based industrialist Nand Khemka bought it for Rs 6.9 crore (69 million rupees), which it calls a record price. Masterworks dates that sale to 2006, at a New Delhi auction, and says the result has since been surpassed. Neither page names the auction house, and the sources give no single year for the painting itself, so this article does not date it.

The sale shows what the 1976 notification leaves open. Since the Act regulates export and not sale inside India, a painting like this can be bought and sold between Indian owners, and the permit rule applies only if someone wants to take it abroad.

Dying at 28, and what her work now sells for

The Delhi Art Gallery dates her death to 5 or 6 December 1941, at midnight in Lahore after a brief illness, and says a posthumous exhibition was held there that month. Auction Daily says it came days before her first solo show in Lahore. The NGMA’s own pages give her age as 29, which does not match a birth date of 30 January 1913 and a death in December 1941; the Delhi Art Gallery, Outlook and Auction Daily give 28.

Prices have followed. In July 2021 Saffronart sold In the Ladies Enclosure (1938) for Rs 37.8 crore (US$5.14 million), reported by The Tribune as a world record for the artist. On 16 September 2023 Saffronart’s Evening Sale: Modern Art in New Delhi sold The Story Teller (1937) for Rs 61.8 crore, which IANS reported as the highest price achieved by an Indian artist.

Her centenary was marked by the NGMA from 31 January 2013, and at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters in September 2013, where Hungary’s UNESCO ambassador said the organisation had declared 2013 the international year of Sher-Gil, according to Daily News Hungary. The NGMA holds 107 of her paintings. On 31 January 2023 the gallery and the Liszt Institute, the Hungarian cultural centre in Delhi, marked her 110th birth anniversary. The Press Information Bureau lists the art historian Yashodhara Dalmia and the filmmaker Mira Nair among those present, and says the event included a curatorial walk through the Jaipur House gallery dedicated to her paintings.