Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Amrita Sher-Gil’s Passive Figures

  • Judith Brown, Indiana University
  • Book:
    Modernism and the Idea of India
    Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025, pp 68-90

  • Summary

    Sher-Gil declared her ambition to be India’s first modern artist, yet her melancholic portraits elicited complaint about her representational choices and share a more than passing interest in the passive as an aesthetic stance. The most challenging aspect of Sher-Gil’s work is its resolute interest in passivity. In representing her subjects’ listlessness (or their object-ness), the painter is able to focus on aesthetic relationships very broadly, recasting subjects and objects from an oppositional to a more inextricably relational or mutually constituting state. Sher-Gil’s paintings make passivity an aesthetic stance. Stepping away from the immediate demands of the socio-political world in which she lives, and in which her models are placed, Sher-Gil revises experience along aesthetic lines. She doesn’t forfeit political agency so much as investigate what it cannot include as she explores the sensual possibilities made available through her haunted and dreaming figures.