Another woman who deserves more attention than she has thusfar received.

From the NY Times:

Amrita Sher-Gil, a pioneer of modern Indian art, used her paintbrush to depict the daily lives of Indian women in the 1930s, often revealing a sense of their loneliness and even hopelessness.

She painted women going to the market, women at a wedding, women at home. Sometimes she showed women bonding with other women. At times the worksseemed to convey a sense of silent resolve. It was a rendering rarely seen indepictions of Indian women at the time, when portrayals tended to cast them as happy and obedient.

Sher-Gil was born in Budapest on Jan. 30, 1913, to the Hungarian-Jewish opera singer Marie Antoinette Gottesmann and Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and a scholar of Persian and Sanskrit. She began taking formal art lessons at age 8, when her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, in northern India.

Sher-Gil also felt conflicted about her sexuality. She was drawn to the idea of a lesbian affair, Dalmia wrote, “partly as a result of her larger view of woman as astrong individual, liberated from the artifice of convention.”

She did, in fact, have relationships with men, seeing marriage as a way to gain independence from her parents. In 1938, she married a cousin, Victor Egan, revealing only afterward that she was pregnant. He arranged for an abortion.

Sher-Gil died on Dec. 5, 1941-at the age of 28. The cause was believed to be complications from a second, failed abortion performed by Egan. She was 28 and was just gaining widespread popularity and taking on commissions.

“I painted a few very good paintings,” she wrote in a letter to her mother inOctober 1931, when she was 18. “Everybody says that I have improved immensely; even that person whose criticism in my view is most important to me — myself.”

With her style and her emphasis on women, Sher-Gil became known as the“Indian Frida Kahlo.”

"Although I studied, I have never been taught painting because I possess in my psychological makeup a peculiarity that resents any outside interference." -Amrita Sher-Gil