タヒチの女としての自画像

In 1934 Amrita Sher-Gil was 21, a Hungarian-Indian art student finishing her training in Paris and about to sail for India to remake herself as an Indian painter. The year before, in London, she had seen the South Seas canvases of Paul Gauguin, the Frenchman who had gone to Tahiti and painted island women as his idea of an untouched paradise. Here she takes his pose and paints herself half nude in it, a real mixed-race woman looking back at the fantasy from inside it. Her skin is built up in warm layers of ochre and brown, her black hair loose down her back, her expression closed and thoughtful. She would be dead by 1941, at 28, her reputation only growing in the decades since.