Amrita Sher-Gil's painting fetches a whopping amount of Rs 37.8 cr

A painting by Amrita Sher-Gil titled In the Ladies' Enclosure has set a global record after being sold for a whopping amount of Rs. 37.8 crore (USD 5.14 million) at an auction by Saffronart held in Mumbai on Tuesday. It became the second most expensive piece of art ever sold by an Indian after V S Gaitonde’s Untitled [1961] that fetch Rs 39.98 crore in March 2021. Dubbed as one of India's most popular woman artists, Sher-Gil's 'The Little Girl in Blue' [1934] was sold for Rs 18.7 crore at a Sotheby’s auction in 2018, according to Artery India.

The Indo-Hungarian artist Sher-Gil, who passed away at the age of 28 in 1941, reserved the title 'National Treasure' which was conferred upon her by the Indian government. On Wednesday, Sher-Gil set a new world record of achieving the highest amount for her artwork at Summer Live Auction. Sher-Gil, who at the time stayed at her father's ancestral home in Amritsar, Punjab, had also painted an iconic piece known as the Group of Three Girls, that won the Gold Medal at the 46th Bombay Art Society Annual Exhibition in 1937. 

"In the Ladies' Enclosure is a seminal work of art in Sher-Gil's oeuvre, marking the zenith of her artistic evolution. Painted in 1938 during the last few years of her life, it is the outcome of decades of arriving into her own as an artist - from a childhood spent developing her promising talent, her formative years in Paris, and finally, returning to India where she rediscovered her roots and found her motivations," Saffronart said, describing Sher-Gil's artistic merits. 

[IMAGE: Saffronart]

A real-life interpretation of Indians

Sher-Gil's powerful composition In the Ladies' Enclosure depicts a group of working women in a field. Most of her work was inspired by her surroundings. She had described that her paintings depicted the real lives of Indians, pictorially. Her choice of the colour palette in the legendary art is an attempt to "bring out the contrast between the hot reds and the greens, one finds in the early Rajput miniatures," Saffronart described. Artworks such as this one were of great significance for Sher-Gil as she found herself "in an unusually content phase" at the time, the prestigious auction house added. Saffronart's CEO and Co-founder Dinesh Vazirani reportedly said that the artwork fetching an exorbitant price was self-explanatory of Sher-Gil's artistic merit, describing the painting as  "rare work" during the concluding years of her life. 

Sher-Gil's rare art portrays a slab of the pale green sky, a horizontal coral-coloured wall in the distance, a slice of flat ground dotted with tiny figures carrying pitchers, and enclosed by a low olive-green hedge is a foreground of dull green grass studded with tiny pink and red birds. The art piece shows a group of women sitting, who are painted in pungent colours and a thin black dog accentuates the horizontal lines on the painting. One can see hibiscus bushes with carmine blossoms and a standing girl. The dominant subjects in the present lot; women, feature in many of Sher-Gil's works, "primarily because she could lend her empathetic self most easily to their condition."