Important Notice

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

Tyeb Mehta's art was focused on subjects that referred to the complexities and dilemmas of the human condition. From his iconic "falling figure" to the trussed bull, Mehta explored a concise repertoire of subjects through an artistic career marked by quiet intensity. Whether the figures were human, animal or... "An artist comes to terms with certain images. He arrives at certain conventions by a process of reduction."- TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta's art was focused on subjects that referred to the complexities and dilemmas of the human condition. From his iconic "falling figure" to the trussed bull, Mehta explored a concise repertoire of subjects through an artistic career marked by quiet intensity. Whether the figures were human, animal or bird, they conveyed - at times even screamed - a sense of disquieting torment and trauma. These figures in crisis are at once, fantastical and earth-bound: unforgiving goddesses fighting demons to the death, rickshaw-pullers, trussed bulls, and birds and humans 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 - a city where he encountered the figure of the rickshaw-puller, the subject of the present lot and one he would return to several times throughout his artistic career. 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. This tragic period in Indian history, experienced intimately by the artist, played an important role in the overarching existential quest of his lifework. Mehta joined the JJ School of Art the same year, and graduated in 1952. During this time, he became associated with the Progressive Artists' Group, helmed by K H Ara, F N Souza, S H Raza and M F Husain. Their rejection of academic realism in art and affinities towards Western movements mirrored his own interests.

Mehta's life was indelibly marked by the Partition. The sectarian violence remained the underlying element in his oeuvre. He was also influenced by the distortionist style of Francis Bacon such that "Tyeb's images, like Bacon's are apocalyptic," says critic Ranjit Hoskote. However, Mehta's figures engage the viewer within the artist's personal narratives of struggle - their defeats and victories, but often also their mere persistence to survive. As the Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel puts it, "These are paintings that pose unanswerable questions about the human condition... That is their moral authority." (Tyeb Mehta, New Delhi: Kunika Chemould Art Centre, 1970)

Though his style has developed over the years from the expressionism of the late 1950s and the 1960s to the minimalism of his current canvases with their flat planes of colour and unfinished lines, this treatment of the iconic central figure has remained a constant in Mehta's work. "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." (Ranjit Hoskote, Ramachandra Gandhi et al., Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 4)

Through this browbeaten figure of the rickshawpuller in the present lot, the artist makes an effort to convey the inescapable, dull and constant suffering that is part of the everyday existence of the common man. Put together out of several sharp, intersecting planes of colour, it is hard to separate the puller from the rickshaw in this image - the yoke is synonymous with his shoulders, while the vehicle's wheels and footboard seem to merge with his own feet. The tragedy of the central figure, emphasises both the subtle violence and the immobility of his situation - the rickshaw becomes a metaphor for "bondage and the slave" rather than "a simple means of transport." (Tyeb Mehta, New Delhi: Kunika Chemould Art Centre, 1970)

Hoskote expresses this message through the duality of "shock and coolness," saying, "A primary experience of shock resonates at the core of Tyeb Mehta's figuration. It is difficult to come away from one of his paintings without sensing a disquiet that is barely held in check by the seam of the line; an anguish bursts against the skin of the pigment. Nothing can completely still this primary experience of shock, although it is considerably muted by the programmatic cooling of structure and the healing strokes of colour for which Tyeb's works are distinguished. Standing before these often monumental-scale frames, we bear helpless witness to the predicaments into which the artist knits his singular, isolated protagonists." (Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p. 3)

Although the extent of Mehta's general body of work is limited, his oeuvre has become almost iconic of Indian modernism, expressing disillusionment with the world and its violence, and inspiring rebirth and change.

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