Important Notice

Tyeb Mehta, born in Kapadwanj, Gujarat in 1925, is one of India’s most celebrated modern artists. Mehta was deeply influenced by the distortionist style of Francis Bacon such that “Tyeb’s images, like Bacon’s are apocalyptic, “ says critic, Ranjit Hoskote. However, Mehta’s figures engage the viewer within the artist’s personal narratives of struggle – their, defeats and victories, but often also their mere persistence to survive. These figures... Tyeb Mehta, born in Kapadwanj, Gujarat in 1925, is one of India’s most celebrated modern artists. Mehta was deeply influenced by the distortionist style of Francis Bacon such that “Tyeb’s images, like Bacon’s are apocalyptic, “ says critic, Ranjit Hoskote. However, Mehta’s figures engage the viewer within the artist’s personal narratives of struggle – their, defeats and victories, but often also their mere persistence to survive. These figures span the gamut from victims of violence to those displaying the potential to do violence themselves – vengeful goddesses grapple with demons, foreboding drummers warn of impending doom, overwhelmed trussed bulls lie still and defeated, birds and androgynous humans careen downwards in endless freefall, and rickshaw-pullers, who, although more defined than the artist’s falling figures, are nonetheless reduced to browbeaten beasts of burden on the canvas.

Though his style has developed over the years from the expressionism of the late 1950s and the 60s to the minimalism of his current canvases with their flat planes of colour and unfinished lines, this treatment of the iconic central figure has remained a constant in Mehta’s work. As the Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel puts it, “These are paintings that pose unanswerable questions about the human condition…That is their moral authority.” (Tyeb Mehta, Kunika-Chemould Art Center Exhibition Catalogue, 1970, unpaginated).

Through the rickshaw-puller, a repeated subject of Mehta’s, the artist makes an effort to convey the inescapable, dull and constant suffering that is part of the everyday existence of the common man. Put together out of several sharp, intersecting planes of colour, it is hard to separate the puller from the rickshaw in this image – the yoke is synonymous with his shoulders, while the vehicle’s wheels and footboard seem to merge with his own feet. The tragedy of the central figure, emphasizes both the subtle violence and the immobility of his situation – the rickshaw becomes a metaphor for “bondage and the slave” rather than “a simple means of transport” (Ibid.).

Ranjit Hoskote expresses this message through the duality of “shock and coolness”, saying, “A primary experience of shock resonates at the core of Tyeb Mehta’s figuration. It is difficult to come away from one of his paintings without sensing a disquiet that is barely held in check by the seam of the line; an anguish bursts against the skin of the pigment. Nothing can completely still this primary experience of shock, although it is considerably muted by the programmatic cooling of structure and the healing strokes of colour for which Tyeb’s works are distinguished. Standing before these often monumental-scale frames, we bear helpless witness to the predicaments into which the artist knits his singular, isolated protagonists.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art” in Tyeb Mehta – Ideas, Images, Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 3).

Although the extent of Mehta’s general body of work is limited, his oeuvre has become almost iconic of Indian modernism, expressing disillusionment with the world and its violence, and inspiring rebirth and change.

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