The story
In 1934, in Paris, the young painter Amrita Sher-Gil painted herself half-clothed, a white cloth around her waist, as one of Paul Gauguin's Tahitian women, with the shadow of a man falling behind her. Born in Budapest to a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother, she was 21, and the picture was shown that year at the Salon des Tuileries. Her work is now designated a national art treasure in India and may not leave the country. Self-Portrait as a Tahitian is among the best-known pictures in the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi.
Kiran Nadar, one of the leading collectors of modern and contemporary Indian art and the wife of the industrialist Shiv Nadar, opened the museum in 2010 in Noida, on the edge of Delhi, and added a second space in a shopping mall in Saket, South Delhi, a year later. The collection has grown from about 500 works then to more than 10,000, from 20th-century modern painting to video installations, along with a large holding of Indian miniatures. A far bigger home for it, near Delhi's international airport, has been under construction since 2023.
