The Hungarian Great Plain

Vivan Sundaram, artist

1946–2023

The Hungarian Great Plain, 2001

Portfolio/Series title: Re-Take of Amrita

Where object was made: India

Material/technique: digital photograph; inkjet print

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 38.1 x 48.6 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 15 x 19 1/8 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 41.8 x 60.1 cm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 16 7/16 x 23 11/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 20 x 25 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Art Acquisition Fund

Accession number: 2012.0155

Not on display

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Images

Label texts

The photomontages in Vivan Sundaram’s Re-Take of Amrita series are digitally manipulated composites of haunting and impossible spatial and temporal encounters between key members of the artist’s family. Sundaram’s mother, Indira (1914–1975), was the youngest daughter of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870–1954)—son of a Punjabi chieftain and an accomplished amateur photographer—and Marie Antoinette Gottesman (1882–1948)—Umrao’s Hungarian second wife. Sundaram’s maternal aunt and Indira’s older sister, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), made a career working between Europe and India creating paintings that would distinguish her as one of the most important modern Indian artists of the 20th century.
The photograph Lovers pairs Amrita, seated in her flat at Rue de Bassano in Paris, with a self-portrait of her partially clothed father, Umrao, from 1930. Hanging on the wall is a painting of Boris Taslitzky (1911–2005), Parisian artist, eventual Communist activist, and Amrita’s lover. The Hungarian Great Plain transposes a coy Amrita lounging on a bale of hay as her smartly attired family parades in the background. Sisters contrasts two siblings seated face to face by pairing a photograph of Amrita taken in 1936 with one of her sister from the 1940s, shattering the spatial-temporal plain through their intense, piercing gaze.