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6Amrita Sher-Gil and Boris Taslitzky Or Who Is The 6Amrita Sher-Gil and Boris Taslitzky Or Who is the “Young Man with Apples” by Amrita Sher-Gil by Vivan Sundaram “It became quite different when she started painting, and when the transposition of the model was born on her canvas….It was neither classical, nor romantic nor contemporary, something belonging neither to yesterday nor today, it belonged to all epochs and to the present, a sort of present that anticipates the future.” Boris Taslitzky FN. 1. The model of Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting, Young Man with Apples, in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi is the same person in her painting Man in White: his name is Boris Taslitzky, as another portrait that bears this name. Amrita painted the latter two portraits in 1930 soon after she joined the studio of Lucian Simon at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts in October 1929 when she was sixteen years old. She had come to Paris with her parents and sister in February and immediately was enrolled in the Grande- Chaumiere, the most famous Academy in Paris in the twenties under Pierre Valliant . ( Giacometti had studied there for five years until 1927, under Antoine Bordelle, who died in 1929) . In March 1929 Taslitzky joined the studio of Lucian Simon ( 1861-1945 ), a realist painter, whose style subsequently shifted towards post-impressionism. The handsome student, two years older than Amrita was on the look out for adventure, for a romance, an ‘orientalist’ attraction was in the making even before they met. FN-2 Painting each other’s portraits was the order of the day. Amrita’s portrait of Taslitzky with his bellowing white shirt, and strong arms, with the red background, has a sumptuous expanse, a flamboyant flair. Just as the Man in White in profile, holding his paint brushes, in a bravado posture, heralds the individual from the Age of Romanticism: “ Delacroix was my passion, the pictorial love at first sight which exalted me without destroying me” Taslitzky declares after spending days at the great retrospective in the Louvre in 1930. The seventeen year old Amrita saw herself and her colleague, posing in the manner of a grand European tradition of portraiture, which through the 19th and well into the 20th century was passionately foregrounding a conscious individuality: as well as subjectivity which would deal with the unconscious. “ The self-portrait is undoubtedly the most disturbing genre in European art” FN-3. In 1930 Amrita painted thirteen of the total number of seventeen self-portraits on canvas be made by her. FN-4 Although most of these paintings are undated there is evidence to imply that they were done in the designated year . In 1930 Taslitzky also painted a portrait of Amrita where the European frames the face of his companion in an exotic manner, with a cascade of black hair, its eroticism peaked with the with an over-painted red mouth. “My eyes sunk into her black ones, as in a velvety pool of authority, out of which I escaped only to fall under the influence of her dark rosy lips”. French society was still in the throes of the good life of the late twenties: with its sense of the Empire still more or less intact, in March 1931 it organized a massive Colonial Exhibition in the park of Vencennes. FN-5 . A public condemnation of it was signed by many intellectuals and artists such as Breton, Eluard, Tanguy and Aragon. Amrita would possibly have known about the controversy, because of Taslitzky’s identification with the radicals who signed the statement. The 1932 portrait Young Man with Apples is constructed with Cezanne in mind and Amrita asks Taslitzky to look at it carefully. “ Right what was the portrait saying ? ….it wasn’t colour for colours sake, a simple decorative emotion, … it came from within the figures themselves was part of their substance, was form itself ” . We see Amrita moving from romanticism, to construction and objectivity, thus aligning herself to the well known credo of that time ‘significant form’. FN. 6. The emotional side of Amrita in the subsequent years and in India expresses the melancholic as well. Marie Louise Chassany, an intense and mysterious colleague, who Amrita has painted a portrait of, says of Amrita’s Young Girls ( 1933 ) “ But it is sad, it’s frightfully sad”. “ It only reflects my soul ” she answers. The post-impressionist Self portrait as Tahitian ( 1934 ) , is a daring painting as Amrita poses herself as a nude torso. This can also be read in an ironical manner, as the Tahitian “other”, one of Gauguin’s ‘women’ portrays herself ; the gaze on the object of desire, is now the subject painted with ‘ Amrita’s female objectivity’.FN-7 . If there is a distancing taking place in painting terms; Amrita detaches herself from this European genre, as she abandoned doing self-portraits on her return to India. ( She made only one which she called ‘ a sugary portrait” , as a commission to earn some money ). Amrita left Paris on the November 19, 1934 and arrived in Bombay on December 6, 1934. * * * From 1932 the French economy felt the effects of the depression , which in turn would bring the society into greater social conflict. From 1932 to 1934 there were an extraordinary number of moderate governments, each pursing ineffectual deflationary policies. Corruption became rampant as exemplified by the infamous Stavisky who was shot dead in January 1934. FN-8. The demonstration and the riots of 6 Feburary 1934 caused the government to fall ( the first since 1848 to fall by a riot in the streets ) . This opened the doors to fascism as well the to an anti-fascist alliance of the broad left, with the formation of the Front Populaire. “ Its horrible the Boris story. He did not deserve it, he one of the very rare few who did not deserve it….But I wont talk of it any more, it makes me feel too unhappy” FN –9 Taslitzky was out in the streets “ You join who you can to fight the main enemy….Hands up! Here are the cops…. I was ashamed, disgusted ,tired” said Taslitzky after he was conned by a female student to join the Republicans to fight the fascists. Amrita was in Budapest in February and according to Taslitzky he did not meet her in the last months before her departure, as he felt she was not involved enough with the anti-fascist struggle. FN-10 Taslitzky also left the Simon’s studio in 1934 and became a militant artist of the Front Populaire ( they won the elections in May 1936 ), as well as was actively involved in the anti-fascist movement as well as became the secretary of the Union of Painters and Sculptors of the Maison de la Culture. In 1936 he painted Le Télégramme (1936) which denounces the murder of Lorca . In November 1941 he was arrested and then interned as a Communist Jew to the Buckenwald camp. His mother was killed there. Amrita made a portrait of her, ( now at the NGMA ) “ With my mother she was perfect, kind, polite, full of respect. Mummy liked her very much, but was worried. What are you aiming at my son. She was right. Shepherds do not marry princesses !” “ For Hitler simply loves the former and detests any manifestations of good modern art or literature, with all his being. Yes, it is dreadful to think of Paris in German hands but what preoccupies me still more is what is going to happen to modern French art ? What has already happened to the younger elements in French painting, youths who though not as yet universally known were known to me and a few others, and whose death would mean an irreplaceable loss to French painting of the future ?” Amrita writes to Karl Khandalavala on 1 July, 1940 from the family estate in Saraya, near Gorakhpur. Taslitzky survived the war and his contribution to ‘ French painting in the future’ has recently found place of significance in new art histories, mainly written by English writers in two Yale University publications, 1993 and 2000. The first in ‘Modernism in Dispute’: Art since the Forties, Francis Francina one of the editors, writes in his chapter ‘The Politics of Representation’ about artists joining the French Communist Party from Picasso and Leger in 1944 and 45 respectively, ‘However, the leading figures celebrated in the party were Boris Taslitzky and Andre Fourgeron’. In 1946 he exhibited his The Little Camp at Buchenwald in the Art and Resistance exhibition in Paris, which included Picasso’s The Charnel House, 1945. The author traces two very different approaches by the artists in dealing with the same subject: From Goya to Realism and from Cubism and Surrealism. ( NOTE” quotation from Christpher Green’s article to come ) In 1946 a great debate began in the French communist party the about ‘the autonomous intellectual’ voiced by Roger Garaudy and ‘ the intellectual of the party’ , held by Louis Aragon. Taslitzky subscribed to the latter view, was on the editorial staff of the party paper called La nouvelle critique' and made paintings like ‘The Delegate’ In 1947 the debate was picked up in Calcutta by Bishnu Dey ( close associate of Jamini Roy, who also wrote extensively on him ) who translated Garaudy’s article for the Bengali magazine ‘Arani’, but the Communist Party paper ‘Parichay’ of which he was on the editorial staff, ( he subsequently resigned ) quoted the Aragon/Taslitzky (with the latter’s name also featuring ? ) as the correct line. FN-11 In 1950 when Ram Kumar became a member of the French Communist Party, he met Taslitzky, who asked him if he had heard of Amrita ! In 1985, when Micheal Troche organized the exhibition Indian Artists in France, in Paris, Taslitzky loaned the self- portrait of printed here, but mentioned to the curator that he had lost the portrait he had done of Amrita.
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