Important Notice

"The art that is born out of struggle is different…I create at my own pace. Thought goes into my works." - TYEB MEHTA

"An artist comes to terms with certain images. He arrives at certain conventions by a process of reduction." - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta's art is complex and layered. It expresses a sense of "disquiet that is barely held in check by the seam of the line" and we, as viewers, can only "bear helpless witness... "The art that is born out of struggle is different…I create at my own pace. Thought goes into my works." - TYEB MEHTA

"An artist comes to terms with certain images. He arrives at certain conventions by a process of reduction." - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta's art is complex and layered. It expresses a sense of "disquiet that is barely held in check by the seam of the line" and we, as viewers, can only "bear helpless witness to the predicaments into which the artist knits his singular, isolated protagonists." (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Guha et al., Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, p. 3)

The six decades of Mehta's artistic career can be traced through the presence of an evolving central figure that is often distorted, caught in free fall, a flurry of body parts without a clear shape. From his iconic Falling Figure series to the trussed bull, Mehta explored a concise repertoire of subjects through an artistic career marked by quiet intensity. His figures, whether human, animal, or bird, conveyed a sense of disquieting torment and trauma. These figures in crisis were both silent victims and merciless aggressors: unforgiving goddesses fighting demons to the death, browbeaten rickshaw-pullers, defeated bulls trussed and ready for slaughter, and humans and/or birds hurtling through the void.

Born in Gujarat in 1926, Mehta was raised in Bombay and spent his summers at his grandmother's home in Calcutta. After he finished school, Mehta joined a film studio specialising in documentaries as an assistant in 1945. Two years later, the political circumstances of India's independence, and the Partition that followed, made it difficult for Mehta to continue working there.

With communal riots dividing Bombay, it was dangerous for someone like Mehta, who lived in a known Muslim quarter, to cross what had then become hostile areas of the city. Mehta's experiences from this tragic period played an important role in shaping the overarching existential quest of his art. Recalling an episode from his early twenties, Mehta says, "There were elements of violence in my childhood... One incident left a deep impression on me. At the time of partition, I was living on Mohammad Ali Road, which was virtually a Muslim ghetto. I remember watching a young man being slaughtered in the street below my window. The crowd beat him to death, smashed his head with stones. I was sick with fever for days afterwards and the image still haunts me today." (Hoskote, Guha et al., pp. 340-341)

While the socio-political milieu of the late 1940s, and specific episodes of the violence it spawned, played an important role in the definition of his practice, Mehta’s work also played a critical role in the definition of modern art in a newly independent India. Along with his associates in the Bombay-based Progressive Artists' Group, Mehta was instrumental in redefining the boundaries of artistic expression in India and extending its engagement with the viewer and society.

Mehta's style went through a period of expressionism in the late 1950s and early 1960s and ultimately settled on the minimalism of his later canvases with their flat planes of colour and unfinished lines. And yet, the treatment of his iconic central figure has remained a constant in Mehta's work throughout. "In Tyeb's paintings, the figure is the bearer of all drama, momentum and crisis, a detonation against the ground it occupies and commands; by contrast, the field appears, at first sight, to be all flattened colour, 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." (Hoskote, Guha et al., p. 4)

An additional element that marked a seminal moment in the evolution of Mehta's artistic career was the introduction of the diagonal. Mehta realised "that the surface could be activated by mobilising its tonal values" when he encountered “the works of artists like Barnett Newman in their use of large Colour Field areas and the decisive division of space" during his stay in the U.S. upon receiving the Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship. (Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p.9)

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 Hoskote, Guha et al., p. 343)

The present lot, depicting a blue bird in free fall, has its roots in Mehta's Falling Figure series, which he first began painting in the mid-1960s. 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. The concept of free fall was perhaps inspired by Albert Camus, whose characters drift in a world of sensations, as well as the myth of Icarus and Phaethon, with the hero "being punished for an unwitting transgression, an unintended display of pride or recklessness: thus, the evocation of free fall is also a minatory reminder of the gravity of fate." (Hoskote, Guha et al., p. 17)

Mehta started focussing more on the falling bird as the central figure in his paintings in the 1980s. He elaborates, "I did the first drawing of the bird as far back as 1983 but as I went along I generally began to feel that the bird always flies so why not make it fall - it's a contradiction in terms. The bird can be made without bringing in flying because that has a different kind of body-lifting movement. Falling means you have more or less given up. It's an interesting idea because I work on fragmentation. It's one of my preoccupations." (Artist quoted in Dalmia, p. 25)

Unlike the chaotic abyss of his earliest Falling Figure works, the present lot reflects influences of the Colour Field paintings of American abstractionists like Newman, whose "monochromatic fields of color and strong vertical dividing lines proved critical for Mehta's own pictorial vocabulary." (Edward Saywell, Bharat Ratna! Jewels of Modern Indian Art, Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2009-10, p. 11)

In Untitled (Blue Bird), the vibrant blue bird hurtles downwards, "its feathers echoing dismembered hands." (Dalmia, p. 25) By contrasting the blue bird sharply against a flat plane, Mehta manages to create a powerful painting that is deceptively simple in its marked complexity that combines concept, line, and composition. He accords the work its own enigmatic narrative, thus positioning it against some of the most iconic Mehta works that are highly sought after by connoisseurs and collectors alike.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site