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“The human figure has become part of my vocabulary, like a certain way of applying colour or breaking up images. It is a sort of vehicle for me. I am not a minimalist or abstract painter... my work is still expressionist. The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to.” ? TYEB MEHTA

Describing Tyeb Mehta’s rarefied place in the canon of modern Indian art, poet Nissim Ezekiel once remarked that his paintings... “The human figure has become part of my vocabulary, like a certain way of applying colour or breaking up images. It is a sort of vehicle for me. I am not a minimalist or abstract painter... my work is still expressionist. The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to.” ? TYEB MEHTA

Describing Tyeb Mehta’s rarefied place in the canon of modern Indian art, poet Nissim Ezekiel once remarked that his paintings “...pose unanswered and unanswerable questions about the human condition. That is their moral authority” (Dilip Chitre, “Celebrating Tyeb Mehta”, Ranjit Hoskote, Ramchandra Gandhi et al, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 324). The human figure remained Mehta’s muse throughout his career, whether depicted in his works as seated, standing solemnly, caught in free fall, or violently entwined with animal forms. The present lot from 1961 is an exceptional example from one of his earliest figurative phases, preceding the emergence of the sharp lines, bisecting diagonals, and flat, bright planes of colour that would come to define his later works.

As a post?colonial artist searching for both a personal and collective identity in the years following Indian independence, Mehta—like his contemporaries S H Raza and Akbar Padamsee— travelled to Europe to engage with modernism from an international perspective. He produced some of his earliest significant works after visiting London in 1954, and later moved to the city for five years with his wife Sakina in 1959. Executed two years later in 1961, this painting was included in an exhibition at Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford, curated by British art critic George Butcher, marking an early recognition of Mehta’s work at a time when he remained largely unknown in the West.

The painting reflects Mehta’s exposure to Western artistic influences, particularly the Old Masters and European Expressionism, during this formative period. He later recalled, “In London, in the 1960s, my wife Sakina and I would visit the National Gallery in the lunch break and sit in front of the Old Masters, particularly Uccello and Piero della Francesca’s works. I was attracted to the Italian masters’ concern with form and more significantly their mathematical exactitude in composition and rendering of human figures.” (Artist quoted in Nancy Adajania, “Tonalities: A Conversation with Tyeb Mehta”, Hoskote, Gandhi et al, p. 350) During his time in Europe, Mehta was also drawn to the writings of Camus and Sartre, and the notion of the Absurd, which was explored by several post? war artists and writers. He likely found a co?relation to India’s own struggle for Independence in these works.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mehta adopted what critic Ranjit Hoskote describes as a “harsh, brushy?textured, impasto?laden expressionism”, exemplified by the present lot. (Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art”, Hoskote, Gandhi et al, p. 5). “In the early work, expression was all?important,” he explained. “I did not yet have the technical means, hadn’t developed an understanding of the language of painting. Expressionism appeals to the viewer directly…I was painting from the gut.” (Artist quoted in “In Conversation With Nikki Ty?Tompkins Seth”, Hoskote, Gandhi et al, p. 40) A seated male figure and a supine female figure dominate the composition, both rendered with a visceral heaviness that sharply contrasts with the smooth, carefully delineated forms he went on to paint a decade later. Executed with a muted palette and only subtle variations in tone, the figures though distinct appear in continuous dialogue with the surrounding space. As art historian Yashodhara Dalmia notes, the surface is layered “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.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: A Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 5)

Mehta uses these figures as conduits to examine psychological states and emotions rather than convey a particular narrative. Their sombre features communicate an unarticulated sadness and sense of resignation, portraying them as individuals who have been rendered passive victims of their fate. Remarking on the artist’s early figuration in a 1966 essay for Thought, critic Richard Bartholomew observed, “Though they are mostly open?mouthed, the faces wear expressions of exhaustion, gaiety, surprise, a death?like ghastliness. They gesticulate and grasp at things. Their voices reverberate, though the reverberation is in a measure of colour. There are mute colours and shrill colours and colours that denote quiet and peace, of the dead and of the living. As these figures live out their lives in paint, their past and future are lumped together in the premise of paint. They are linked inexorably to this locale. They are strangely naked yet completely dressed, for it is feeling and not flesh that is revealed. And this feeling is not of the flesh satisfied or strained but of the spirit, which is timeless.” (Richard Bartholomew, “Twelve Compositions with the Figure by Tyeb Mehta”, The Art Critic, Noida: BART, 2012, p. 414)

The pervading sense of unease in Mehta’s figures is autobiographical in origin, stemming from the artist’s experience of the widespread sectarian violence that broke out during the Partition of India in 1947. He carried the devastating human suffering he witnessed while living in South Bombay’s Mohammed Ali Road with him throughout his life, expressing it in his art through defining motifs such as trussed bulls, rickshaw pullers, and falling figures. Yet, despite embodying fear and anxiety in the face of unspeakable violence and misery inexorably wrought by circumstance, his figures maintain a quiet sense of “dignity”, as noted by critic and theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi. They are stoic in their suffering, perhaps a reflection of Mehta’s own methodical, contemplative nature. As Alkazi explained in his speech during the opening of the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1959, “Tyeb Mehta is not a prolific painter [...] This restraint should not be mistaken for laziness or lack of ideas, but rather his recognition of the discipline of Art: the careful, almost ascetic, tempering of the sensibility and the spirit, inwardly, through contemplation, thought, and concentration; allowing the original idea to be distilled through the sieve of time, so that what ultimately takes shape is the result of a profound, significant experience [...] Such a work is not born merely out of the senses; and so it does not merely assault our senses; it does not bludgeon and cosh us… It is the art of a sensitive, contemplative, slowly?thinking, slowly?maturing individual, caught in the turmoil and pain of life but refusing to react to it with hysteria.” (Ebrahim Alkazi, “The Works of Tyeb Mehta”, Hoskote, Gandhi et al, pp. 370?371)

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