He has millions of rupees worth of junk at the same time as beautiful jade and good Mogul and Rajput paintings in his palace…and when I saw the Lord Leightons, the Wattses, the Bouguereaus amassed there and everybody in the party spouted admiration and praise, I felt so sick that when he asked me what I thought of them I asked him in return how on earth anybody with any taste could buy Leighton, Bouguereau and Watts when there were Cézannes, Van Goghs and Gauguins in the market.

  After this he unsurprisingly refuses to buy her two “Cubist” pictures, and she is “of course furious.”

  Writing to her close friend and ally Karl Khandalavala, she talks about his art criticism in terms that might have damaged a lesser friendship:

  One has an impression of a lucid impersonal account written by an objective person, the possessor of a calm and collected mind. And while one is reading it one is inclined to say aloud “quite so” but as soon as one has laid it aside one forgets it. That is to say “it creates no powerful or lasting impression on the mind.” It is too moderate in its mode of expression (perhaps the fault lies in your choice of words).

  Her most heightened contempt is reserved for the artists of the Bengal School, whom she compares dismissively to the ancient Ajanta cave painters:

  Ajanta is painting with a kernel, the painting of the Bengal School has only got a shell, it is a lot of things built round nothing, a lot of unessential things and it would cease to exist if those unessential things were taken away from it.

  She admits that Jamini Roy has “a certain talent” but refuses to allow his line to be compared to the masters of Ajanta either.

  This ferocity of mind and sharpness of tongue, combined with an unashamed openness about her own behavior and an insistence on her right to behave as she chooses, are also present in her thoughts about her family and friends. When her father (“Duci”) hesitates about her proposed return to India from Europe and accuses her of lacking interest in India, she delivers herself of an extraordinary text that is at once an artistic testament and an assault on her father’s narrower mores of social and sexual conduct:

  I wish to return primarily in interest of my artistic development….How utterly mistaken you are when you speak of our lack of interest in India, in its culture, its people, its literature, all of which interest me profoundly….Our long stay in Europe has aided me to discover, as it were, India. Modern Art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical, but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe I should perhaps never have realized that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than the whole Renaissance! In short, now I wish to go back to appreciate India and its worth….I was rather sad to realize that you place the conservation of your good name above your affection for us. I was also disappointed to know what a place of importance you give to the bickering of public opinion….I don’t in the least consider myself an immoral person, I am not immoral….Besides I think you are rather dramatizing the situation (a thing you are apt to do at times) when you say that the ruin of your good name is synonymous with our returning to India. Fools and mischief-makers will always talk, even if one doesn’t give them food for it. And there are narrow-minded, prejudiced and fanatical people all over the world, in India too (as you found out at your expense) but need one bother about them?

  She chides her mother too, first for maltreating servants and later, as that troubled lady descends into mental instability, for her lies.

  She charges us indiscriminately with every vice, criminal ingratitude being the least of them, of filth, sloth and abnormal sexual manias.

  Caught between a cold, conventional father and an increasingly deranged mother, Amrita takes refuge in an artistic vision remarkable not only for its outspokenness but for its passionate love of what is beautiful. In a letter to her sister Indu, she tells of frescoes found in Cochin:

  I spend my days from morning till evening—that is to say till the light fails—at a deserted palace here. It contains some perfectly marvelous old paintings that haven’t been “discovered” yet. Nobody knows about them and the local people—even so-called responsible people like the Diwan—would destroy them I am sure if that were in their power because some of the panels depict erotic scenes. Animals and birds are copulating with the utmost candor but curiously enough the human figures are never depicted in the act….It is only when one starts copying them that one realizes what an astounding technique these people had and what an amazing knowledge of form and power of observation they possessed. Curiously enough unlike the slender forms of Ajanta the figures are extremely massive and heavy here. The drawing perhaps the most powerful I have ever seen.

  The Cochin frescoes return in a passionate letter to Karl Khandalavala, and it is clear they influenced her deeply, just as Brueghel did, and Renoir. She became convinced that “all art, not excluding religious art, has come into being because of sensuality: a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical.”

  Her taste in art is impeccable, whether it be European literature (Rousseau, Verlaine, Proust) or the majesty of the Ellora carvings and Ajanta cave paintings (“Dear Karl, ELLORA, AJANTA. Revelation”). Her taste in human beings is good too: “I have met a wonderful woman at last, Sarojini Naidu. And her two interesting daughters. One…who is intelligent and witty, and her younger sister who looks the older of the two—a strange wild creature, sympathique comme tout.” (Sarojini Naidu was an important figure in the independence movement, a political activist and a poet whose work earned her the nickname “the Nightingale of India.”)

  A woman like Amrita could perhaps not be expected to be happy in such a time. She writes to Indu in March 1941:

  I…have passed through a nervous crisis and am still far from being over it. Feeling impotent dissatisfied irritable and unlike you not even able to weep. There seem to be forces at work—elemental forces—disrupting, throwing things out of equilibrium. The chaos and darkness of the lives of individuals—the wars earthquakes floods—all seem to be indefinably interconnected. We are not alone. I see it everywhere.

  (But then, a few lines on, she finds time to criticize her sister’s handwriting—“you must make an effort to render it lisible”—and to be glad that a new divan “looks lovely.”) Six months later she was dead, aged just twenty-eight, of a cause that remains uncertain.

  It is immensely moving to encounter, in Amrita’s letters, this impassioned, opinionated, brilliant voice that spoke so clearly but for such a brief time. To return to her paintings after this reading is to find new depth in her somber palette, all earth tones and shadows. She writes, only partly ironically, of choosing to depict

  principally the sad aspects of Indian life…It may be that the sadness; the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models (which to me is beauty that renders insipid all that which according to the standards of the world goes under the category of the word “Beautiful”) corresponds to something in me, some inner trail in my nature which responds to things that are sad, rather than to manifestations of life which are exuberantly happy or placidly contented.

  Amrita Sher-Gil’s is an art that moves naturally toward the melancholy and tragic, while keeping its eye fixed firmly on high ideals of beauty. That it, and she, were so often misunderstood is poignant, but not, perhaps, surprising. In a letter from abroad, written to her parents in August 1938 after they had burned a “roomful” of her letters, including old love letters, she resigns herself to a

  bleak old age unrelieved by the entertainment that the perusal of old love letters would have afforded…

  and ends, piteously, in Hindi: Me kohi aysi baat nahin kahungi ya karungi jisse aap ko dukh pahunje. “I will not say or do anything which may cause you pain.”

  She was denied old age, bleak or otherwise, but neither her exuberant, magnificent self, nor the work it made, contained anything for which she needed to apologize. Time has passed, and her art endures. As Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby wrote of his mother, Aurora: “Even now, in the memory, she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects on others…Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep.”

  BHUPEN KHAKHAR (1934–2003)

  I first met Bhupen Khakhar in the early eighties. It was at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London. There was a gathering at which writers and artists visiting from India were given the opportunity of meeting writers and artists of Indian origin based in London. Bhupen and I hit it off immediately and became friends. He said he had read and enjoyed my books, in part because he saw a connection between them and his pictures. I had the same feeling, in reverse. There was a rapport between us artistically, a sense that each of us knew what the other was trying to do, that we were trying to achieve the same ends but in different art forms.

  In my early work I tried to base my writing on the colloquial street language of Bombay. Similarly, Bhupen drew on the visual language of the Indian street—painted storefronts, trucks and rickshaws, hand-colored movie posters—for many of his works.

  Visiting Bhupen at his home in Baroda, in the Indian state of Gujarat, was like entering his pictures. He’d take you down a back alley into a watch repair shop, and suddenly you were in one of his canvases, filled with bold colors.

  He was a storyteller, using the old traditions of narrative painting much as I was trying to use a version of the Indian oral storytelling tradition. The more you look at his images, the more you see going on. Often a whole tale plays out in one canvas, as in the title work of his 2016 Tate Modern retrospective, You Can’t Please All, in which a father and son taking their donkey to market appear several times.

  A year or so after we first met, I visited him at the Knoedler Kasmin gallery on Cork Street in London, where he had a show. As it happened, I had just sold a short story to an American magazine and the check was in my pocket. There was a painting in the show with which I instantly fell in love, Second Class Railway Compartment. I didn’t think I would be able to afford it but asked the price anyway, and discovered it was exactly the same figure as the one on the check in my pocket. (Only about £1,500 or so—Indian art was still ludicrously cheap back then.) I loved the idea of turning my story into his painting. So that’s what I did. I bought it, and it remains one of my most treasured possessions.

  Second Class Railway Compartment is not a part of the Tate Modern show, but two other works I own are: the oil painting Window Cleaner and a limited-edition art book we made together, Two Stories, in which he illustrated a couple of my stories, “The Free Radio” and “The Prophet’s Hair,” with woodcuts and linocuts.

  I think of Bhupen as the best of a fascinating generation of artists who tried to find and forge new languages for Indian art, a “middle generation” preceding the current stars (such as Subodh Gupta, whose work sells for high prices and who regularly cites Bhupen as an influence) and following the earlier masters who had been powerfully influenced by Western art. The horses of M. F. Husain, for example, jump straight out of Picasso’s Guernica, while the work of many other big names (such as S. H. Raza) was deeply indebted to developments in Western abstraction. That middle generation of artists such as Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and others was extraordinary, with Bhupen perhaps its leading light.

  I actually sat for Bhupen in 1995. The BBC was making a documentary about my novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, a novel inspired by my friendships with Indian artists including Bhupen. (There’s a character in the novel, a painter known as “the accountant,” that’s a deliberate reference to him. He worked as an accountant some of the time.) The BBC thought it would be a nice idea to have my portrait painted as a segment of the program, so I immediately suggested Bhupen, who came to London to do the portrait. He borrowed a friend’s studio in Edwardes Square, off Kensington High Street. Barely had we sat down than Bhupen took out his charcoal and drew a single-line profile portrait that was the most exact likeness you could ever have imagined. He then did the painting on top, with characters from the book depicted around me. But I’d love to have an X-ray of that painting and see the drawing underneath again.

  (The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel about a painting hidden under another painting, so it’s appropriate, I suppose, that there’s a drawing hidden under this painting too.)

  In the finished image, he took his lead from classic Indian portraiture but gave it a modern twist. In the royal portraits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Indian princes, the body faces the viewer while the head is in profile. Bhupen painted me the same way—the joke, however, is that while the princes of yesteryear wore elaborate muslin shirts in the finest fabric, I’m shown wearing a cheap nylon shirt. These days the painting hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He’s the only Indian painter with a work there, and I’m very proud that it’s a portrait of me.

  Bhupen Khakhar was a superb painter, and a brave one. He revealed his homosexuality on canvas and dealt openly with gay themes, never a simple matter in India, where it was then illegal to be gay. In his early pictures, he was indirect and allusive, but as he grew older and more confident, his work became much more sexually explicit. In an Indian context these works were, and perhaps remain, shocking.

  Bhupen died of cancer in 2003. He was a huge figure in the history of Indian art. The Tate retrospective brings him a whole new level of international appreciation, something he richly deserves.

  BEING FRANCESCO CLEMENTE: SELF-PORTRAITS

  Gagosian Gallery, London, 2005

  Just as we all have sovereign individual selves, or so the Renaissance taught us, so also are our faces possessed of a sovereign individuality. We all carry within ourselves self-portraits that are, for the most part, portraits of our faces, though there must be, there are, cases in which we, some of us, see ourselves in other parts of our bodies; a muscleman’s self-image may be the picture of a biceps, a dancer may see herself as existing most fully in her feet, a gigolo in his genitalia, or a pianist in her hands. But mostly it is in our faces that we face ourselves, and in this regard the invention of the looking glass is an event of some importance, making possible as never before the prolonged daily study of the self, the self as face, the self as reflected self from which that further reflection, the self-portrait, can be born. We should not, however, overstate the importance of this moment, because before the looking glass there were earlier proto-mirrors; the Incas had mirrors of a sort, could not do without them, even though they never learned the secret of the wheel. And in Greece and Rome there were polished shields, such as those in which it was safe to behold the Gorgon, and glassy pools, such as the one by which Narcissus, perhaps the first self-portraitist, lay in eternal contemplation of his beauty.

  Nor is the availability of a reflection essential. We know ourselves whether we see our mirror images or not. “Man cannot understand without images,” Aquinas said, and our minds are programmed to construct those images, even without the help of our eyes. The consequence of the gift of self-consciousness, the gift that makes us human, is the invention of the self-image. Blind men have painted self-portraits, and sculptors who never saw their faces nevertheless carved them in stone. Almost three and a half thousand years ago, Bak, the chief sculptor of the pharaoh Akhenaten, made stone carvings of himself and his wife, Taheret or Taheri. At that time portraiture was a commissioned art, yet Bak felt the need, without hope of financial reward, to portray himself and his beloved. Phidias, it’s said, was jailed for the blasphemy of carving the image of his own face on Athena’s shield in the Parthenon. He must have known of the taboo he was breaking, yet he broke it, yielding to the ancient, potent urge to be seen by others as one sees oneself.

  To take a walk along the famous Vasari Corridor in Florence, the covered walkway built by Giorgio Vasari in 1565 to allow Cosimo de’ Medici to walk unobserved between the Uffizi Gallery and the Pitti Palace, which now houses perhaps the world’s greatest collection of self-portraits, is to witness many comparable acts of self-revelatory bravery. Here the minatory patriarchal hauteur of Lucas Cranach the Elder seems to terrify the haunted, youthfully uncertain Filippino Lippi; the swagger of Velázquez’s stance and the suspicion in his eyes are answered by Rembrandt’s serene undefended acceptance of the passage of the years. Chagall reveals himself as a blue wizard, with one of his airborne ladies at his brow, while the Swedish painter Carl Larsson is a clown, in a clownish hat, holding a clown doll. To make a work of art one must use a form of double vision, looking simultaneously outward and inward, making naked what is clothed and telling what is secret, and revealing how the interior world of sensibility, memory, and fear is linked to what is shouted aloud and paraded before our eyes in the world all around, which is so brightly illumined but which remains, nevertheless, opaque, until the artist’s nakedness provides the key that unlocks its mystery. This is what we mean when we say that art is an act of courage and why the success of a great self-portrait feels almost heroic, because this is the form that is, perhaps, the locus classicus of the meeting between the interior and exterior worlds; failures of self-portraiture, the preening reluctances one encounters all too often, are evidence of a type of cowardice.

  The self-portrait is the interrogation of what the artist knows best, but it is also the most polymorphous of forms, emphasizing continuity or change, surface or depth, mask or skull. And sometimes the artist is merely the model—though perhaps the artist when serving as his own model is never “mere”: Caravaggio, painting himself as the decapitated head of Goliath, was himself a falling giant nearing the end of his life; Artemisia Gentileschi lending her big, strong features to her ferocious heroines also intended something personal, as, no doubt, did James Montgomery Flagg when he used his own features to create the ultra-patriotic image of “Uncle Sam.”