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Born in Gujarat in 1925, Tyeb Mehta's artistic career spanned several decades, styles and media. Mehta's first forays into the world of art were as a budding cinematographer and film editor in the wake of the Second World War. Later, in part because the communal rioting during the partition of the Indian subcontinent considerably circumscribed his activities, he turned to painting, enrolling at the Sir J.J. School of Art, which was close to his... Born in Gujarat in 1925, Tyeb Mehta's artistic career spanned several decades, styles and media. Mehta's first forays into the world of art were as a budding cinematographer and film editor in the wake of the Second World War. Later, in part because the communal rioting during the partition of the Indian subcontinent considerably circumscribed his activities, he turned to painting, enrolling at the Sir J.J. School of Art, which was close to his home in Bombay.

Given his experiences during Partition, human manifestations of violence, struggle and survival came to hold deep meaning for the artist from a very early age. 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" (Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 340-341).

While the sociopolitical milieu of the late 1940s, and specific episodes of the violence it spawned, played a very important part in the definition of his practice, Mehta's work also played a vital role in the definition modern art in newly independent India, mirroring some of the most pivotal moments in the history of the subcontinent. 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.

In the mid 1960s, the artist also had a firsthand experience of the Indo-Pakistan war, working on a government project that took him to the frontlines of the conflict. Given these personal experiences with violence, aggression and upheaval, one of the primary concerns of Mehta's art is the profound and almost-endemic nature of human suffering. As his biographer Ranjit Hoskote explains, the artist is well known for his translations of this uneasiness onto canvas. "Tyeb Mehta has spent many years in the contemplation of suffering. He has condensed long histories of violence and melancholia into the most austere forms; he has delivered the freight of trauma through isolated figures delineated in planes of flat, pure colour that vibrate against one another without discreet intervals of tonal shading" ("The Alchemical Sacrifice", Tyeb Mehta: Paintings, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1998, not paginated).

Unsurprisingly, the figure has always enjoyed primacy in Mehta's artistic vocabulary. "Tyeb's focal images are symptomatic of their lifeworld: they attest to the churning chaos of Indian society, its antinomies of eroticism and violence, aggression and tenderness, helplessness and brute force. Magisterial as they are, dominating the spaces they occupy, these presences are nevertheless first and foremost figures of crisis" ("Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta's Art", Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 15). These 'figures of crisis' are both silent victims and merciless aggressors: unforgiving goddesses fighting demons to the death, defeated bulls trussed and ready for slaughter, birds and humans hurtling through the void, and browbeaten rickshaw-pullers.

Of his figurative images, Mehta's 'falling figure' is perhaps the most iconic. The artist first explored the idea of the falling figure in the mid 1960s on his return from London, and it was his earliest painting in this series, a 1965-66 canvas, which won him the Gold medal at the first Indian Triennale, held in New Delhi in 1968. Following a work-study trip to the United States in 1968 on a Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship, Mehta returned to this image in the 1970s, and then again after completing a residency at Santiniketan in the late 1980s, when the present lot was executed.

Speaking about these paintings, Edward Saywell of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts notes, "Like Francis Bacon, with whom he has been compared, Mehta trod the fine line dividing abstraction and representation. Although never entirely abstract, the radical purity of his forms and simple delineation reflect a pivotal visit he made in 1968 to New York. There, he saw firsthand the minimalist practice of many of his American contemporaries and, perhaps more profoundly for his own development, the paintings of Barnett Newman. The latter's monochromatic fields of color and strong vertical dividing lines proved critical for Mehta's own pictorial vocabulary. He began to paint his renowned series of falling figures following a visit in 1965 to the frontline of the War with Pakistan" (Bharat Ratna! Jewels of Modern Indian Art, Museum of Fine Arts exhibition catalogue, 2009-10, p. 11).

The present lot, executed in 1988, is one of the most important paintings from Mehta's suite of falling figures. Here, for the first time, the artist entangles his androgynous human figure with that of a bird, both captured as they hurtle downwards into a dark abyss from what appears to be a closing window of blue. As in many of his works, here Mehta draws on both Indian and Western myths and legends to create a substrate upon which he painstakingly builds an image that reflects his own concerns. In this painting, the artist refers as much to the age-old story of Icarus, whose wings, affixed to his body with wax, melted under the sun dooming his attempt to fly, as he does to that of Garuda, Lord Vishnu's vehicle, a mighty eagle-human hybrid symbolic of war and violent force.

The figures, locked together in endless freefall, convey not only the anxiety and disquiet that Mehta carried with him following his experiences of the horrors of Partition and war, but also his engagement with modernist concepts like existentialism and 'Universal Man'. Thus, more than motifs of personal anguish and 'doomed heroism', Mehta's falling figures come to represent a collective existential crisis.

Referring to the falling figure as one of the artist's "primal triad of images", Hoskote speaks about its genesis, noting, "The falling figure was born from another struggle with the self: while Tyeb had decided to abjure narrative, he found that an accentuation of formal explication could attenuate the forcefulness of the experience...The measure of free fall was suggested by the delirium and vertigo of Camus' characters, individuals come unfixed from their milieux, adrift in a world of sensations, ideas and provocations from which they are radically estranged. This reading also locates the falling figure in a genealogy that reached back into Greek antiquity, as a descendent of Icarus or Phaethon...thus, the evocation of free fall is also a minatory reminder of the gravity of fate" ("Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta's Art", Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 17).

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