Anjolie Ela Menon

Anjolie Ela Menon was born in 1940 in Burnpur, Bengal, of mixed Bengali and American parentage, and went to school at Lovedale in the Nilgiris. She had sold a few paintings by the time she left school at fifteen and held a solo show of fifty-three works at eighteen. She studied briefly at the Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art, took a degree in English at Miranda House in Delhi, and from 1959 to 1961 was at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris on a French government scholarship.

She used those years to travel in Europe and West Asia looking at Romanesque and Byzantine art. She paints mostly in oil on masonite, building the picture from translucent colours and thin washes. Her subjects are religious themes, portraits and nudes. As a student she was drawn to Modigliani, M. F. Husain and Amrita Sher-Gil. In 1997 she showed non-figurative work for the first time.

She is also a muralist and has worked in Murano glass and computer graphics. She represented India at the Paris, Algiers and São Paulo biennales. Her work is in the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Chandigarh Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, and in 2006 the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco acquired her triptych Yatra.

She received the Padma Shri in 2000 and lives and works in New Delhi. She collects too: Arpita Singh, Jamini Roy, F. N. Souza and K. G. Subramanyan among others.