Important Notice

"Tyeb is a figurative painter. His loyalty to the human figure I interpret also as loyalty to human values, to recognition of man as being always and forever the centre of the universe.”
— Ebrahim Alkazi (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramchandra Gandhi, et al, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 325)

The human figure was central to Tyeb Mehta’s paintings throughout his career. In his words, “The... "Tyeb is a figurative painter. His loyalty to the human figure I interpret also as loyalty to human values, to recognition of man as being always and forever the centre of the universe.”
— Ebrahim Alkazi (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramchandra Gandhi, et al, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 325)

The human figure was central to Tyeb Mehta’s paintings throughout his career. In his words, “The reference to the human figure is essential to my work, not as an anatomical body, but as a form which helps me to create space. I don’t paint woman or man. I paint the human image, its plasticity.” (The artist quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, Ramchandra Gandhi, et al, “Tonalities: A Conversation With Tyeb Mehta, Nancy Adajania,” Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 359)

Mehta’s paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s are significantly different from the minimalist figurations that he would later become known for. These were created before his 1968 trip to America as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, which would prove to be a turning point in his oeuvre and result in the sharp lines, bisecting diagonals, and flat expanses of bold colour that became hallmarks of his work up until his death in 2009.

In the initial stages of his artistic career, Mehta “practised a harsh, brushy-textured, impasto-laden expressionism aligned with the School of Paris” that was favoured by his peers and Western counterparts in the wake of World War II. (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. 5). Mehta was also influenced by Francis Bacon’s rendering of human anguish through grotesque imagery after coming across his works on a visit to England at the beginning of the 1960s.

Painted in the 1950s, the present lot is a pertinent example of the artist’s early figures, which were depicted with a dramatic heaviness of form. This was a manifestation of his lifelong preoccupation with the human condition and the memories of the violence he witnessed as a young boy in Mumbai during the Partition of India in 1947. Observes critic Ranjit Hoskote, “In the earliest years of this first phase of his art, Tyeb’s protagonists communicated the seismic unease of fugitives, refugees, survivors, individuals ill at ease in their ethos, their bodies like squared-up masses held firm by rope-thick outlines.” (Hoskote, p. 5)

"The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to. But in transferring that image to canvas, I begin to think in terms of modulating the canvas, distributing areas of colour and apportioning space." - TYEB MEHTA

Though some of his figures take on an androgynous appearance, the female form is a recurring theme in Mehta’s work. However, unlike the violent, contorted and fractured forms of his goddesses and falling figures, the woman rendered in this present lot appears restrained and unmoving, depicted as an individual who has come to accept their fate. Her face, with its fearful eyes and pursed lips, suggests an unarticulated feeling of anguish and a sense of resignation. Art historian Yashodhara Dalmia remarks, “His paintings in sombre tones could loosely be termed expressionistic and articulated the fate of individuals who were in some way cornered by fate.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: A Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 5)

In the present lot, the figure is revealed through a monochrome palette and thick, impasto brush strokes. “The thickly stroked paint would layer the surface with a heavy patina of disquiet. The rendering of colours, of equal tonality and applied in verisimilitude, provided a cohesion, which would yet seem like a fierce interlocking. A compressed battle would ensue also between figure and the space surrounding it...” (Dalmia, p. 5)

By placing the figure front and centre and using only subtle variations in hue and tone, Mehta blurs the boundaries between object and context. The canvas is heavily saturated with colour, a characteristic he would retain across his oeuvre. “I don’t work with transparent colours. I find that a body of colour gives a density to the canvas,” explained the artist. (Hoskote, Gandhi, et al, “In Conversation With Yashodhara Dalmia,” p. 354)

Despite the underlying despair and torment, Mehta’s figures are notable for their embodiment of a certain “dignity”, as noted by theatre director and curator Ebrahim Alkazi during the opening of the artist’s first solo show in 1959. In Mehta’s works, “man is denuded, stricken, stripped of all elegance, charm, good looks, fleshy beauty but he has not lost his dignity. He is famished physically and otherwise but he has not become grovelling and grotesque. He is patient and enduring. He suffers; he accepts his suffering. Such art is not the art of despair but hope.” (Ebrahim Alkazi quoted in Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p. 368)

Through his fixation with the human form, Mehta simultaneously externalised his own inner world and held a mirror up to society. “Proceeding by an archaeology of motive and decision, we may infer that he started with images that had haunted him, burning themselves deep into his mental circuitry… In the act of fashioning his mental images on paper and canvas, translating emotive potential as palpable constructs- symbols advanced by the self in the hope of eliciting responses from others-he bridged autobiography with the universe of shared meaning... [The artist] paints creatures of light who are marooned on earth: figures of a doomed heroism, struggling captives of destiny, angels thwarted in flight. Tyeb, through his anxieties, aspires to a Sublime that transcends the polarity of beauty and terror, and has not foreclosed the option of the Transcendent.” (Hoskote, Gandhi, et al, pp. 14, 16)

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