Important Notice

"In the early work, expression was all-important... I was painting from the gut." - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta's paintings from the late 1950s and early 60s are markedly different from the minimalist figuration that became essential to his later work. Several paintings from this early phase, including the present lot, depict human figures who seem to be made of wet clay, only just emerging out of the earth to which they belong.... "In the early work, expression was all-important... I was painting from the gut." - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta's paintings from the late 1950s and early 60s are markedly different from the minimalist figuration that became essential to his later work. Several paintings from this early phase, including the present lot, depict human figures who seem to be made of wet clay, only just emerging out of the earth to which they belong. This dramatic heaviness of form was an early manifestation of his continuing concern with the human condition. Within a decade, Mehta had begun his move towards the opposite end of the spectrum, creating lighter figures with a brighter palette.

The present lot stands testimony to Mehta's engagement with the figure throughout his career. Painted in 1961 during his stay in England, influenced perhaps by the grotesque distortions of Francis Bacon's existentialist art, Mehta uses an almost monochromatic palette to portray a weighty, seated female figure. Thick, impasto-laden brushwork forms the medium out of which Mehta's figure is revealed. In paintings from the 1950s and early 1960s, "The thickly stroked paint would layer the surface with a heavy patina of disquiet. The rendering of colours, of equal tonality and applied in verisimilitude, provided a cohesion, which would yet seem like a fierce interlocking. A compressed battle would ensue also between figure and the space surrounding it..." (Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: A Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 5)

Mehta's interest in the figure is consistently at the heart of his vision. "Tyeb is a figurative painter. His loyalty to the human figure I interpret also as a loyalty to human values, to a recognition of man as always and forever at the centre of the universe." (Ebrahim Alkazi, 11 March 1966, quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al., Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 371) The female form that emerges in this painting dominates the canvas, as do so many of the figures in Mehta's early and later works. He would gradually move towards a more androgynous being, but here, the form is, as Dalmia says of another painting from the same period "...a tired and heavy- bellied woman who was carrying the weight of her life with a grave forbearance." (Dalmia, p. 7)

There is a congruence of theme and construction in the present lot. Poet and art critic Nissim Ezekiel found Mehta's early work to be focussed on mass, weight and texture with a severity that complemented the substance of the subject matter itself. "These are paintings that pose unanswerable questions about the human condition... That is their moral authority." (Nissim Ezekiel quoted in Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, p. 324) By placing the figure front and centre, and using only subtle variations of hue and tone, Mehta blurs the boundaries between object and context. "These are landscapes of the human spirit, forlorn and tragic and uncomprisingly [sic] alone." (Alkazi, p. 371)

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