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Lot 80

 

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Painted in 1963, towards the end of his stay in England, the present lot is representative of one of the earliest phases of Tyeb Mehta’s figuration, before he turned to the sharp lines, bisecting diagonals and flat expanses of colour that became the hallmarks of his later works. In these early paintings, Mehta layered his canvases thickly with expressionist brushstrokes out of which his solitary subjects seemed to be etched. Rather than the... Painted in 1963, towards the end of his stay in England, the present lot is representative of one of the earliest phases of Tyeb Mehta’s figuration, before he turned to the sharp lines, bisecting diagonals and flat expanses of colour that became the hallmarks of his later works. In these early paintings, Mehta layered his canvases thickly with expressionist brushstrokes out of which his solitary subjects seemed to be etched. Rather than the explicit violence and fractured forms of his unforgiving goddesses and falling figures, these men and women were apprehensive and unmoving, their features indiscernible and their bodies aged and flaccid. Like passive victims, frozen in the moment they were captured by the artist, they seemed to have surrendered to their fate and to the violence of their time.

Like his later works, these early paintings are shaped by the artist’s experiences of violence, particularly his memories of the brutal Partition of India that he lived through in his childhood. It is not surprising, then, that Mehta’s works are populated by figures suspended in agony and distress, their mouths twisted in anguish, their limbs petrified, and their bodies awkwardly distended. Contemplating the artist’s works from the 1960s, the poet Nissim Ezekiel noted that they “…create an ethos of brooding, sombre consciousness for which there is no equivalent, so far as I know, in modern Indian painting. These are paintings that pose unanswered and unanswerable questions about the human condition…That is their moral authority” (Tyeb Mehta, Kunika Chemould Art Center exhibition catalogue, 1970, not paginated).

Ranjit Hoskote elaborates, noting that, “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” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art”, Ideas Images Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 5).

The present lot is an important example of this early phase in Mehta’s oeuvre, and stands testimony to his preoccupation with the figure throughout his career. Here, the artist portrays a lone figure in a single tone, caught uncomfortably between being seated and standing. Largely androgynous, the solitary subject’s face is a site of despair with forlorn features that speak of loss and disaster. Its body only echoes this despondent expression; while one arm clutches at its head, the other lies limp by its side, its sagging shoulders and chest unable to bear the weight of the gloom that has descended upon it.

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