Important Notice

“Each of Tyeb’s paintings acts as a silent movie, in which we see mouths screaming, faces distended in terror, flailing limbs, thrashing wings; but the artist leaves it to us to imagine the horror of sound.”
(Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art”, Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 20)

Tyeb Mehta was... “Each of Tyeb’s paintings acts as a silent movie, in which we see mouths screaming, faces distended in terror, flailing limbs, thrashing wings; but the artist leaves it to us to imagine the horror of sound.”
(Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art”, Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 20)

Tyeb Mehta was a quiet, introspective artist who produced art that was as subtle and nuanced as it was powerful. Like his iconic trussed bull, the falling figure is one of the seminal protagonists of the artist’s work, born out of a need to come to terms with the immense violence and suffering he witnessed during the Partition of India in the late 1940s as well as during later decades of his life. Whether human, bird, or animal, it is distinguished by its fractured form depicted in a state of free fall with a face frozen in horror, conveying a sense of anxiety and unease in the face of tragedy and the inevitability of fate. Curator and art critic Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Bearers of uncertainty and creatures of unrest, Tyeb’s figures are at once archetypal and indicative of ordinary experience, formal symbols of suffering and oppression that also encode real gestures of hurt and trauma.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art”, Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 19)

Mehta first explored this motif after returning to India from England in the mid-1960s. His earliest painting of the subject, completed in 1965, earned him the Gold Medal at the inaugural Indian Triennale in New Delhi in 1968. The same year, he travelled to New York on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, where his exposure to Colour Field abstractionists like Barnett Newman marked a pivotal turning point in his artistic journey. He gave up his expressionist style in favour of sharp, flat planes of colour and a deliberate apportioning of space, elements that became hallmarks of his paintings for the remainder of his career. “As his style matured, Mehta hit upon a simple device to articulate freer expression and achieve dramatic effect-he cast his boldly outlined figures, sometimes screaming and hysterical, intertwined and emerging out of each other and merging with one another, against flat geometric surfaces like screens.” (Balraj Khanna, Aziz Kurtha, “Individualism”, Art of Modern India, London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1998, p. 31)

By the late-1980s, Mehta had begun morphing the falling figure with that of a bird, a flurry of limbs and feathers, merging into a strange, composite creature, similar to the one seen in the present lot. “The eye leaps from detail to detail, remaking the whole with every glimpse: through the interpenetrating blades that are the composite figure’s limbs, we take in the braced yoke of the shoulders, the flurry to the rooster’s beak, claw and feathers; we ride on the visual rhymes of the open beak and the open mouth, the flapping ends of the unfurling wing or mantle and the tip of the beak; we fix on the round, glazed eye of terror. Is the bird, thrusting out of the cage of the human body, recovering the gift of flight? Is the man an angel falling away from his birthright? [...]we are left to determine for ourselves the precise nature of the twinned and separated figures…” (Hoskote, p. 42)

Painted in 2006, the present lot marks a significant turning point in the evolution of Mehta’s art during the last few years of his life. The falling figure was among the first of a concise series of seminal images that he used as a conduit to examine the human condition throughout his artistic career. Here it reaches its peak as the artist strips it of the bright planes of colour, which had come to define his works since the late 1960s, and reduces it to its pure form. Striking in its minimalism, the work makes a powerful impact through the simplicity of its line, and even pared down, it possesses “a resonant presence domineering the surroundings with disquiet.’’ (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man”, Tyeb Mehta Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 9)

While the figures appear frozen in mid-air, Mehta simultaneously imbues the work with a sense of movement through the use of the diagonal, a stylistic device he often used for dramatic effect in the years following his Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1968. According to Mehta, the diagonal, thus, became a way “to activate a canvas. If I divided it horizontally and vertically, I merely created a preponderance of smaller squares or rectangles. But if I cut the canvas with a diagonal, I immediately created a certain dislocation. I was able to distribute and divide a figure within the two created triangles and automatically disjoint and fragment it. Yet the diagonal maintained an almost centrifugal unity...in fact became a pictorial element in itself.” (Artist quoted in “In Conversation With Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth”, Hoskote, Guha et al., p. 343)

Parallels can be drawn between Mehta’s falling figures and the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and perished after his wings, which were affixed to his body with wax, melted and thwarted his attempts to escape the labyrinth of Crete. At the same time, the image resonates with Indian mythology, invoking the story of Jatayu, the demi-god of the Ramayana who fell to earth and died after his wings were clipped by Ravan during his heroic attempt to rescue Sita.

Painted with a dichotomic sense of dynamism and restraint, the fiercely entwined figures in the present lot not only convey the personal anxiety that Mehta sought to externalise, but also his engagement with the modernist concept of a collective existential crisis. Hoskote remarks, “Eventually in these images which currently inhabit Tyeb’s imagination, we return to the vexed and vexatious figure, creature of crisis and bearer of epiphany; and we see, through the many appearances it takes on and casts off, the true lesson of persistence…The dream of transcendence that lies at the heart of Tyeb Mehta’s art does not reveal itself easily; he makes certain that we must work strenuously to reach it, sharing with him, every inch of the way, in the work of art.” (Hoskote, p. 42)

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