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Lot 49

 

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Bulls

“The trussed bull also seemed representative of the national condition... the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies.” - TYEB MEHTA

The bull is one of the most iconic symbols that dominated Tyeb Mehta’s artistic career. As he said, “My images are very carefully chosen. For instance, the very first image that I painted with a great deal of thought and emotion was that of a trussed... Bulls

“The trussed bull also seemed representative of the national condition... the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies.” - TYEB MEHTA

The bull is one of the most iconic symbols that dominated Tyeb Mehta’s artistic career. As he said, “My images are very carefully chosen. For instance, the very first image that I painted with a great deal of thought and emotion was that of a trussed bull.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, Journeys: Four Generations of Indian Artists in Their Own Words – Volume I, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 88)

Born into the tight-knit Bohra community in Mumbai in 1925, Mehta chose to renounce the family business and attend the J J School of Art in 1947 instead. He was profoundly moved by the sight of buffaloes at a slaughterhouse near Kennedy Bridge in South Bombay and would often spend time there sketching the sights he witnessed. Later, he would shoot a few minutes of his 1970 film Koodal at a slaughterhouse in Bandra, calling it the “most poignant” sequence of the short film. (“In Conversation With Yashodhara Dalmia,” Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 352) The artist was also deeply affected by the violence he witnessed firsthand during the Partition of India in 1947, and these transformative experiences would inform his oeuvre until his death in 2009.

The bull as a subject first made an appearance in Mehta’s work in 1956, delineated as trussed and quartered. “I wanted to show the violation of man on man but didn’t want to use a literal image. While in London, I was fascinated by the Egyptian bas relief in the British Museum and the bull image emerged...I felt that if I showed a bull about to be slaughtered, a trussed bull, it would express the fact of man’s immense potential held captive. A bull running is raw energy and here it was trussed up for slaughter,” explained the artist. (Dalmia, Journeys: Four Generations of Indian Artists in Their Own Words – Volume I, p. 88)

In early works such as Trussed Bull(1966), the bull was rendered in a frenetic series of impasto strokes, with colours delineating the animal’s form. This style underwent a transformation after Mehta encountered American abstractionists, such as Barnett Newman, during his stay in the US in 1968 as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. “My encounter with minimalist art was a revelation...I had such an incredible emotional response to it. The canvas had no image...but the way the paint had been applied, the way the scale had been worked out… the whole area was proportioned. There was something about it which is inexpressible,” noted the artist. (“In Conversation with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth,” Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 342)

By the end of the 1960s, Mehta’s early expressionist style was thus replaced by swathes of colour, minimal two-dimensional figures, and a deliberate apportioning of space. His 1999 painting, Bull on Rickshaw, for instance, features a contorted bull flung on top of a rickshaw, rendered with flat, sharp, and intersecting planes of colour.

During the 1990s, the bull also formed the central figure of Mehta’s Mahishasura series which depicted Mahishasura, the demon bull, locked in battle with the goddess Durga. “Half-animal, half?man, the two seem to be in constant conflict with each other. Unlike Picasso’s Minotaur, Mehta’s man-bull stands alone, a being into himself, venerated rather than venerating. The tension between the man and the animal interlocks them as well as unites them in a symbiotic movement. Classical rhythms underlie their ceaseless conflict, the forces of good in constant conflict with evil, an apotheosis of his trussed bulls, wounded and flayed over the years.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Last Supper,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 220)

The present lot is Mehta’s final, completed work, produced between 2005 and 2007, during the last few years of his life. The painting can be seen as a culmination of the artist’s lifetime quest to articulate the pain and struggle of day-to-day existence. It was vastly influenced by the writings of Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino’s posthumously published work, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which the artist greatly admired. Calvino’s first memo, for example, speaks of a lightness of being that one achieves after venturing into the depths of the mind. “These thoughts were synergic with his own realizations as he moved towards making a magnificent room-sized work of the very image that he had perfected over the years: the buffalo.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 25)

With fragmented planes and twin silhouettes of bulls tumbling downwards, this diptych is an apogee of Mehta’s endeavour towards pure minimalism. Relinquishing the bright colour palette that had come to be his signature, he chooses instead to render the figures in a muted brown. At first sight the bulls appear to be “a series of bland, featureless planes that impede the manifestation of the figure, or even fragment the figure into intriguing shards. Only gradually does the eye, unpuzzling the painting, recognise that Tyeb treats figure and field as interlocked and not separate entities.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art,” Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 4)

Placed laterally over the expanse of the canvas, the two bulls evoke a pair of yoked buffaloes. “But the animals here are freed from their captivity, only to be brutally dismembered with their legs, bodies and heads shown clearly rather like an x-ray vision...The animals revolve around their own axis, relaying a whole complex of emotions from violence and despair to hope and renewal.” (Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, p. 27)

The fragmented silhouettes appear suspended on the canvas and share an affinity with Mehta’s falling figures. “The bull and the fractured figure were part of the same emotional source and conveyed a strong sense of life nipped in the bud. The falling figure which was constructed would be stripped to its bare essentials and yet have a resonant presence domineering the surroundings with disquiet.” (Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, p. 9) Through the manipulation of space, these twin, disjointed forms seem to convey the dichotomy between movement and stillness, the juxtaposition of pathos and defeat against dignity and resilience.

Bulls also exemplifies Mehta’s use of the diagonal as a means of activating the canvas. “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. Often powerful diagonals cut across the canvas, reminiscent of the way the sixteenth-century Mughal painters charged their pictures with boundless energy, as for example in works like Hamza-nama (also known as the Romance of Amir Hamza), with action proceeding diagonally.” (Balraj Khanna, Aziz Kurtha, Art of Modern India, London: Thames and London Ltd, 1998, p. 31)

Embracing varied styles across his career, Mehta continued to hone the imagery of the bull that had first gripped him as a young man right until his last years. Through the iconography of the bull, he not only showcases a profound sense of powerlessness and anguish but also endeavours to transcend this despair in his artistic oeuvre. “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, Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, p. 27) The monumentality in size and scale and stark minimalism of Mehta’s final work thus embodies the pinnacle of the development of this pivotal iconography through his multi-decade career. In a fitting tribute to Mehta’s deep commitment to perfecting his craft, art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote remarks, “As an artist, though, he was hard and even inflexible in his insistence on dedication and quality, unforgiving of lapses from this norm. This was not a paradox at all; he was guided by the idea that excellence is not only desirable, but that it is possible to achieve, both in aesthetic and in moral terms.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “An Artist Wrestles With the Angel-Demon of His Art,” Art India, Volume IV, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 92 - 93)

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