“...the very first image that I painted with a great deal of thought and emotion was that of a trussed bull.” - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta’s five-decade career was defined by the evolution of his painterly imagery through a focused and deliberate selection of subjects. Among these, the trussed bull has held special significance, serving as both one of his earliest and most enduring motifs and featuring in his final completed work as a... “...the very first image that I painted with a great deal of thought and emotion was that of a trussed bull.” - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta’s five-decade career was defined by the evolution of his painterly imagery through a focused and deliberate selection of subjects. Among these, the trussed bull has held special significance, serving as both one of his earliest and most enduring motifs and featuring in his final completed work as a powerful expression of the violence and anguish inherent in the human condition.

Mehta was born in 1925 in Kapadvanj, Gujarat, and grew up in Bombay. The riots and sectarian violence that he witnessed as a young man in the late 1940s played a very important part in the definition of his artistic practice and the themes of violence, struggle, and survival took on a profound significance in his work. Recalling an episode from his early twenties he has said, “The memory of the man being butchered in the street outside my house during the Partition riots left a lasting impression on my mind. At that time I lived in Mohammed Ali Road…The crowds beat the man to death, smashed his head with stones. I was sick with fever for days afterwards and the image still haunts me. Even today I can’t bear the sight of blood.” (Artist quoted in Nancy Adajania, “Tonalities: A Conversation With Tyeb Mehta”, Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 357)

By the time Mehta began his artistic practice in the early 1950s, India had just been newly liberated from colonial rule. Like his associates in the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, who sought to redefine Indian art, he was drawn to the ideas of international modernism and left for London in 1954 to study contemporary Western art movements. It was at the British Museum that he encountered an image that resonated deeply with his inner turmoil and the horrors of Partition that continued to haunt him. A trussed bull in an Egyptian bas-relief became the inspiration for the present lot, created in 1956-the first major painting of the subject that would go on to define his career.

Mehta’s fascination with the bull began during his student days. He admired the plasticity of the bull of the Sarnath pillar, but his connection to the subject deepened at the sight of the buffaloes and bulls that were caught and bound and brought to Kennedy Bridge in South Bombay and to a slaughterhouse in the suburbs of Bandra. He would often observe and sketch these animals, struck by the stark contrast between the raw power and virility that they were known for and their brutal subjugation. Explaining the significance of the bull in his art the artist has said, “As the discovery of an image, the trussed bull was important for me on several levels. As a statement of great energy… blocked or tied up. The way they tie up the animal’s legs and fling it on the floor of the slaughterhouse before butchering it…you feel something very vital has been lost.” (Artist quoted in “In Conversation With Yashodhara Dalmia”, Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al, p. 341) These experiences affected him so intensely that he later shot part of his award-winning 1970 film Koodal at the same slaughterhouse in Bandra, pronouncing the three-minute sequence the “most poignant” part. (Artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man”, Tyeb Mehta Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 7)

The remarkable sophistication of this painting stems not only from the power of Mehta’s imagery but also from his ability to distil his subject into its essential elements. Like his drawings from the same period, the artist delineates the bull in thick, precise black lines. The colour fields laid down in thick impasto demonstrate the equal importance he accorded to colour, space, and structure. This would later manifest itself as flat fractured planes of colour which became emblematic of his mature style from the late 1960s onwards.

By prioritising self-restraint over unfettered expression, Mehta creates a tension between freedom and containment in the present lot. To the artist, the imagery of the trussed bull held both a personal and a broader social significance. It was a metaphor for humanity that has failed to live up to its potential, and also an expression of his own feelings of stagnancy and being trapped by circumstance. In his words, “The trussed bull also seemed representative of the national condition... the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies. Perhaps also my own feeling about my early life in a tightly knit, almost oppressive community… At the age of twenty-one, I was living in a void. I had practically no contact with the outside world. Years later in London, working in the most menial of jobs, I was still trying to break out of those shackles, to emancipate myself. Independence for me was personal as well as national… I wanted to identify with the new nation as a whole rather than remain bound to the community.” (Artist quoted in “In Conversation With Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth”, Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al, p. 341)

Despite its gruesome implications, the bull was not merely an expression of violence but also an indication of a desire to transcend the resultant suffering. Notes critic and writer Ranjit Hoskote, “...even while it insists on retaining a shock which refuses to be quelled by coolness, it equally strongly maintains a formal remoteness which suggests the opposite of trauma.” (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al, p. 3) It is this paradox that makes the artist’s work particularly compelling. Summing up his oeuvre, Yashodhara Dalmia writes, “In a lifetime’s work, viewed as a process, it could be said that Tyeb has achieved on the one hand an articulation of pain and struggle and a saga of survival, and at the same time a painterly language which parallels reality with an equal resilience.” (Dalmia, p. 27)

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