Important Notice

“The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to.” - TYEB MEHTA

The human form was a lifelong preoccupation for Tyeb Mehta and a subject he used throughout his oeuvre as a mirror to society. These “figures work themselves into a pattern of focal images: pared, stripped-down, even soundless, yet powerfully resonant, they embody an artist’s intuitions concerning his neighbours, his compatriots, his fellow prisoners in the... “The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to.” - TYEB MEHTA

The human form was a lifelong preoccupation for Tyeb Mehta and a subject he used throughout his oeuvre as a mirror to society. These “figures work themselves into a pattern of focal images: pared, stripped-down, even soundless, yet powerfully resonant, they embody an artist’s intuitions concerning his neighbours, his compatriots, his fellow prisoners in the nation-state and on the planet, people who must live and work, love and fight, agonise and enjoy themselves within the same habitus...they attest to the churning chaos of Indian society, its antinomies of eroticism and violence, aggression and tenderness, helplessness and brute force.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramchandra Gandhi, et al, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art,” Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 15)

The present lot, completed in 1955 at the start of Mehta’s artistic career, is an early drawing that was possibly used as a template for a sculpture. The head appears to be of the artist’s own likeness with features that are more realistic than those of his later figures. Even so, they are mildly misshapen and distorted, a stylistic device that would become more pronounced in his subsequent figures, especially those of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a manifestation of his contemplation on human nature and suffering, prompted by memories of the violence he witnessed as a young boy in Bombay during the Partition of India in 1947.

In contrast to the violent, contorted, and fractured forms of Mehta’s goddesses and falling figures, the expression of the subject of this drawing conveys a certain stoicism. Despite the underlying despair and torment, the figure nevertheless embodies a certain dignity. As theatre director and curator Ebrahim Alkazi remarked during the artist’s first solo show a few years later in 1959, “...man is denuded, stricken, stripped of all elegance, charm, good looks, fleshy beauty but he has not lost his dignity...He is patient and enduring. He suffers; he accepts his suffering. Such art is not the art of despair but hope.” (Ebrahim Alkazi quoted in Hoskote, Gandhi, et al, “The Works of Tyeb Mehta,” p. 368)

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