Reframing Art History’s Archive: Self-as-Other and Other-as-Self in Amrita Sher-Gil’s and Pushpamala N.’s Citations

In this article I analyze two self-portraits by women artists that question art history’s power structures by citing canonical paintings by men from the discipline’s archive. In Self-portrait as Tahitian (1934) Hungarian-Indian woman artist Amrita Sher-Gil depicts her own half-nude body, while referencing the (in)famous Tahiti paintings by Paul Gauguin, underscoring the various complexities of the global trajectories of modernist artistic practice. The photograph Lady in Moonlight (2004) casts Pushpamala N. as the idealized lady of an 1898 Raja Ravi Varma oil painting. I argue that through a double bind position (Spivak) taken by the artists, Self-Portrait as Tahitian and Lady in Moonlight make gender visible in art history’s archive and display its structuring power in canonical logics. Through a citational move, the artists place themselves simultaneously in- and out-side art history, and posit not only the self as other, inherent to any self-portraiture, but also the Other as self