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Lot 11

 

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An associate of the Bombay based Progressive Artists' Group, Tyeb Mehta's career spanned several decades, styles and media. Born in Gujarat in 1925, Mehta's first forays into the world of art were as a budding cinematographer in the wake of the Second World War. Later, in part because the communal rioting during the partition of the Indian subcontinent drastically circumscribed his activities, he turned to painting, enrolling at the Sir J.J.... An associate of the Bombay based Progressive Artists' Group, Tyeb Mehta's career spanned several decades, styles and media. Born in Gujarat in 1925, Mehta's first forays into the world of art were as a budding cinematographer in the wake of the Second World War. Later, in part because the communal rioting during the partition of the Indian subcontinent drastically circumscribed his activities, he turned to painting, enrolling at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai.

From very early in his career then, human manifestations of violence and suffering on one hand, and endurance, on the other, came to hold deep meaning for the artist. In his meticulously executed and fundamentally figurative body of sketches and paintings, Mehta drew heavily on personal experiences and images of struggle and survival that haunted him through his life. Condensing "…long histories of violence and melancholia into the most austere forms; he has delivered the freight of trauma through isolated figures delineated in planes of flat, pure color that vibrate against one another without discreet intervals of tonal shading" (Ranjit Hoskote, "The Alchemical Sacrifice", Tyeb Mehta: Paintings, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1998, not paginated).

According to Yashodhara Dalmia, in tracing "the trajectory of the human form in Tyeb's paintings", the late 1960s marked a breaking point, when the artist began to transition from his largely expressionist brushwork and heavily textured renderings of the figure to the flat expanses of colour, sharp lines and bisecting diagonals that were the hallmarks of his later portraits. "It took place on his return from the U.S. where he stayed for a year in 1968 sponsored by the Rockefeller 3rd Fund Fellowship. In encountering the works of artists like Barnett Newman…in their use of large Colour Field areas and the decisive division of space, Tyeb realized that the surface could be activated by mobilising its tonal values" ("Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man", Tyeb Mehta - Triumph of Vision, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2011, p. 9). Applying this new awareness of colour and association to his figurative idiom, Mehta discovered a way to 'activate' his canvases and critically distance himself and his viewers from his subjects without compromising his vision or its expression.

In the catalogue essay for an exhibition of Mehta's work at Santiniketan in 1986, his contemporary, K.G. Subramanyan observed this shift, noting that, "…from the skinned and the raw Tyeb moves to the distant and the iconic. But not so distant as to lose the emotional touch, and not so iconic as to be an inert symbol. He is too vulnerable to do that. Also too urbane to be openly demonstrative. So he walks on the razor's edge making a pact between Dionysius and Apollo, reconciling Mondrian with Michelangelo" (Nandan, Kala Bhavan exhibition catalogue, 1986, not paginated).

Hoskote locates the figurative works that Mehta painted following this transition at the intersection of 'shock' and 'coolness'. He observes that, "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" ("Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta's Art", Tyeb Mehta - Ideas, Images, Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 3).

The white and ochre protagonist of present lot, painted in the early 1980s, closely mirrors the central, androgynous, multi-limbed figure in Mehta's seminal 1985 triptych, Santiniketan. According to Dalmia, this is a powerful and ageless figure has an almost mythic presence, redolent of the familial gods of tribal societies across the country; a figure that would reappear in several variations in the artist's canvases during that decade and the next, including as the fearful goddesses Durga and Kali. Half-seated, half-standing, this figure and others from the period, according to Mehta, served as modulating elements rather than narrative ones on his canvases.

The artist noted, "The human figure has become a part of my vocabulary, like a certain way of applying colour or breaking up images. It is a sort of vehicle for me…The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to. But in transferring that image to my canvas, I begin to think in terms of modulating the canvas distributing areas of colour and apportioning space. I put a certain distance between myself as the seer and the canvas as the seen to allow the painting to exist as an entity in its own right" ("In Conversation with Nikki Ty Tomkins Seth", Ibid. p. 343).

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