Important Notice

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

Tyeb Mehta’s work shows a deep preoccupation with the figure for the entirety of his artistic career. He “deliberately restricted his pictorial language to a small repertoire of figurative images and devices, which he has deployed and refined, calibrated to varying degrees of intensity or recast through mutation, through the years.”... “In the early work, expression was all-important...I was painting from the gut.” - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta’s work shows a deep preoccupation with the figure for the entirety of his artistic career. He “deliberately restricted his pictorial language to a small repertoire of figurative images and devices, which he has deployed and refined, calibrated to varying degrees of intensity or recast through mutation, through the years.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al., Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 13)

The present lot was painted in 1966, barely two years after Mehta’s return to India from England in 1964, and is representative of one of the earliest phases of his figuration. Mehta had spent five years in England, and his works from the time reflected the “harsh, brushy-textured, impasto-laden expressionism aligned with the School of Paris models,” a practice that was favoured by many of his contemporaries, and their Western counterparts, in the aftermath of World War II. (Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p. 5)

During his time in England, Mehta was also exposed to the museums and galleries there as well as the artistic discourse of the time, and it proved to be a phase of “considerable rejuvenation. Among the works of major artists, Tyeb was influenced by Francis Bacon whose consciousness of anguished humanity expressed in grotesque imagery made an impact on him.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: A Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 7)

These early gestural expressionist paintings, of which the present lot is a part, were made before his trip to America in 1968 on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship - a trip that resulted in Mehta turning to the sharp lines, bisecting diagonals and flat expanses of colour that became the hallmarks of his later works.

As can be seen in the present lot, these early works were layered with thick, impasto-laden brushstrokes through which the figure was revealed. Rather than the explicit violence and fractured forms of his unforgiving goddesses and falling figures, these men and women from the late 1950s and early ‘60s were apprehensive and unmoving, their features indiscernible and their bodies aged and flaccid. Like passive victims, frozen in the moment that they were captured by the artist, they seemed to have surrendered to their fate and to the violence of their time. These paintings are “typified by a direct rendering of experience on the surface. His paintings in sombre tones could loosely be termed expressionistic and articulated the fate of individuals who were in some way cornered by fate.” (Dalmia, p. 5)

Composed of sombre earthy hues and rendered with a monochromatic palette, the seated figures in the present lot would blend into the hazy background were it not for the animated gestures of the man on the left. His face, with its expressive features, is the focal point of the canvas. This was characteristic of many of these early works where “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.” (Dalmia, p. 5)

Mehta was known to be a contemplative artist who mused over his paintings for extended periods of time before completing them. As a result, he only made a few paintings a year. “Proceeding by an archaeology of motive and decision, we may infer that he started with images that had haunted him, burning themselves deep into his mental circuitry. We may infer, also, that these obsessional images, autobiographical in import, gradually gained in significance as Tyeb externalised them, reflected on them, and allowed them to shimmer against the wider canvas of society.” (Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p.14)

As is the case with his later works, Mehta’s early paintings are shaped by the artist’s experiences of violence, particularly his memories of the Partition of India that he was witness to in his early youth. This provides a plausible explanation for why Mehta’s works are populated by figures suspended in agony and distress, their mouths twisted in anguish, their limbs petrified, and their bodies awkwardly distended. This was particularly evident in Mehta’s works from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s in which his “protagonists communicated the seismic unease of fugitives, refugees, survivors, individuals ill at ease in their ethos...” (Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p. 5)

Yet, despite the underlying misery, Mehta’s figures are notable for their embodiment of a certain “dignity,” as noted by Ebrahim Alkazi. The figures in the present lot, huddled together in animated conversation hint at this quality. As seen here, the figure in Mehta’s works “... is denuded, stricken, stripped of all elegance, charm, good looks, fleshy beauty but he has not lost his dignity. He is famished physically and otherwise but he has not become grovelling and grotesque. He is patient and enduring. He suffers; he accepts his suffering. Such art is not the art of despair but hope.” (E Alkazi quoted in Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p. 368)

The present lot likely stems from Mehta’s interactions with Alkazi in 1966, when the latter had been directing an adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. Mehta had made a series of drawings based off of the play in the same year. The sombre tones and draped robes of the present lot are similar to those used in the play. A solo show at the Kumar Gallery in New Delhi in 1966 highlighted similar works from that period, demonstrating Mehta’s strong preoccupation with the subject.

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