Portrait of an artist as a young woman

The ongoing three-month-long exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York is proof, if any were needed, of Nasreen Mohamedi's position as one of the most significant Indian modern artists. But little is known about the personal life of the artist who died in 1990, only 53, of a degenerative nerve disorder. She is known to have been reclusive and intuitive, much like her inscrutable paintings that are at once simple and complex.

Artist Nilima Sheikh, who worked with her closely at the Fine Arts department at MS University in Baroda, speaks on Mohamedi's life and work:

A circle of friends 

I first met Nasreen when she came to Baroda to attend a seminar. This was while I was still studying. I became closer to her about a year later when she moved to Delhi. It was, for her, an assertion of independence because she had a loving and protective family. She stayed in a barsati in Nizamuddin East and was very friendly with Kishen (Khanna), Tyeb (Mehta) Geeta (Kapur, the art critic) and Ram Kumar – all of whom lived nearby. She became a part of the Delhi art community and made close friends.

I remember one summer we went on a trip to Agra and Fatehpur Sikri in my parents' car; that's when she did those Fatehpur Sikri photographs.

Her decision to move to Baroda and take up a teaching position there, I think, was at the prompting of Jeram Patel. That was 1971. After a few years, I was appointed as temporary faculty to teach painting. We worked together in the preparatory studio for quite a while in the mid to late seventies and shared many things. This cemented our friendship and my respect for her.

The Baroda circle

From the outside, Baroda may be associated with figurative-narrative painting, but that was not the only kind of work practised and admired there. Jeram Patel, who did abstract and abstracted figurative work at the time, was highly thought of. Having said that, the kind of abstraction Nasreen developed was very different.

Nasreen was not an unknown artist when she came to Baroda, at least not amongst the cognoscenti. Artist friends already thought highly of her. I can't remember exactly when, but it was directly after she moved to Baroda that she started to work with pen and ink. Before that, she had worked with oil and roller, perhaps inspired by Gaitonde.

An inspiring teacher 

Her teaching was exceptional. She passed on her spatial understanding to her students in unique ways. For instance, the "floating out of space" effect you see in her work, I saw in her students' work as well, an understanding of creating a universe out of the whole paper. She was not particularly interested in depth, in materiality, in weight.

Despite this flesh 

She was not a morbid person. Her works indicate that she was reclusive and it is true that she kept her most private fears to herself, but she was very positive. She was fun-loving and enjoyed a lot of friendships. She was not sparing of herself. We used to, until she was too unwell to do so, go shopping, have fun, travel together. Her house was open to people she was close to.

Dear diary

She would talk to very close friends about traumatic aspects of her life – losing her mother early, a broken engagement quite early in her life, her brothers' deaths, her own deteriorating health. But we never encountered the kind of trauma her diaries revealed after her death. Her diaries plumb a depth to create a language of despair; a part of her life she did not articulate even to close friends. They became a private way of coping and examining her trauma, floating it out into a creative energy.