Important Notice

Summer vacations spent with his grandmother in Calcutta might have provided Tyeb Mehta with early inspiration to use the figure of Kali as a symbol of the inbred, societal violence he decried, but it was his residency at Santiniketan in the mid 1980s that cemented its place in his art. As the artist explained, "I've lived with the Kali image for more than three years before even thinking of putting it on the canvas. It's a fantastic image…It's a... Summer vacations spent with his grandmother in Calcutta might have provided Tyeb Mehta with early inspiration to use the figure of Kali as a symbol of the inbred, societal violence he decried, but it was his residency at Santiniketan in the mid 1980s that cemented its place in his art. As the artist explained, "I've lived with the Kali image for more than three years before even thinking of putting it on the canvas. It's a fantastic image…It's a primordial image. I've always wanted to paint a mother Goddess...At Santiniketan in Bengal I could feel the presence of Kali and Durga" ("In Conversation with Yashodhara Dalmia", Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 346).

For Mehta, Kali was both a harbinger of destruction, and a portent of the end of violence in her ability to contain and destroy ignorance and malevolence. In the present lot, a study of the goddess' face, her countenance with its single wide eye, gnashing teeth and stuck-out tongue is magnetic and commanding. While the "…Kali image is powerful and virulent...at the same time [it] has a nurturing function. Kali simultaneously creates as she destroys. It is as if the long years of flayed and hurtling forms are finally contained and transformed into a cosmic act" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 116).

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