Important Notice

This work, seemingly hinging on a tension, highlights Mehta's early artistic concerns, serving as a precursor to his idiomatic development. Completely unlike his later figurative works, it is a very rare painting that shows a confluence of folk and tribal influences. This ties in with the concerns of contemporaries such as Shankar Palsikar, who imbibed folk and tribal techniques in his art and influenced Mehta. Mehta developed an affinity to... This work, seemingly hinging on a tension, highlights Mehta's early artistic concerns, serving as a precursor to his idiomatic development. Completely unlike his later figurative works, it is a very rare painting that shows a confluence of folk and tribal influences. This ties in with the concerns of contemporaries such as Shankar Palsikar, who imbibed folk and tribal techniques in his art and influenced Mehta. Mehta developed an affinity to Palsikar while at the Sir J. J. School of Art in 1947-1952.

Other artistic concerns, such as the use of saturated, flat colours and the decision to focus on only one or two motifs, avoiding narrative, can be seen as stemming from this work. While Mehta's use of flat colours prevails in his later works, this work suggests a plot-something he deviates from in subsequent works. Here, the characters seem to be on a journey fraught with uncertainties: the tension, though nascent, pervades the work, owing to the framing of the scene. The women appear to be momentarily taking respite from this tension, and Tyeb captures this almost as a still from an episode or a film. His engagement with the subject and form in this work is experimental and transitory.

Dalmia summarises the transition rather aptly: "In the formative years in the late forties and fifties Mehta's work was typified by a direct rendering of experience on the surface....A compressed battle would ensue also between the figure and the space surrounding it, interpenetrative as two entities, which would coalesce to form an independent relationship creating a new interpretative reality" (Yashodhara Dalmia, "Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man", Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2011, pg.5).

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