Amrita Sher-Gil: "Two Girls", 1939 (Focus‪)‬

... gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time ... (1) Recent years have seen a concerted effort on the part of many to discard the prefix "female" or "woman" before artist, when speaking of the work of artists of the female sex. Such terminology, they argue, inscribes a predetermined reading onto the image, marking it as representing the concerns of women alone. This ascription of art within gendered categories was a rarity in the early 20th century, when to be a woman and an artist in the public sphere implied choices that went against established art-historical norms. In this context, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-41) emerged as one of the most significant artists in pre-Independence India.