UCLA

This thesis revisits the work of Indo-Hungarian artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), a pivotal modernist from India’s colonial period. Sher-Gil has been lauded for her daring mediation of Western and Eastern aesthetics, her self-portraits, and intimate paintings of family, friends, and South Indian women. However, Sher-Gil was additionally outspokenly bisexual, yet her treatment of same-sex desire in her paintings has been notably limited to her biographies.To this end, this project suggests the possibility of a critical, racialized queerness that can be mapped onto her oeuvre, particularly in Two Girls, Young Girls (1932), and Woman Resting on a Charpoy (1937-38). Taking a cue from Sher-Gil’s nephew, artist Vivan Sundaram, who has critically reimaged the archive of his late aunt’s work through his digital photomontage series, Re-Take of Amrita (2001-2002), this thesis argues that Sher-Gil’s paintings establish intersecting conceptions of race and sexuality that are in continual conversation with each other, seamlessly slipping between platonic, romantic, and familial love. What does it look like, Sher-Gil seems to ask, to desire outside of the masculine nationalist project? Or rather, what does it look like to desire within it?