Important Notice

An associate of the Bombay-based Progressive Artists' Group, Tyeb Mehta's career spanned several decades, styles, and media. Born in Gujarat in 1925, the artist's first forays into the world of art were as a budding cinematographer in the wake of the Second World War. Later, in part because the religious rioting during the Partition of India drastically circumscribed his activities, Mehta turned to painting, enrolling at the Sir J.J. School of... An associate of the Bombay-based Progressive Artists' Group, Tyeb Mehta's career spanned several decades, styles, and media. Born in Gujarat in 1925, the artist's first forays into the world of art were as a budding cinematographer in the wake of the Second World War. Later, in part because the religious rioting during the Partition of India drastically circumscribed his activities, Mehta turned to painting, enrolling at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay.

From very early in his career, then, human manifestations of violence, struggle and survival came to hold deep meaning for the artist. Given his personal experiences with aggression and upheaval, one of the primary concerns of Mehta's art is the profound and almost-endemic nature of human suffering. As Ranjit Hoskote explains, the artist is well known for his translations of this disquiet onto canvas. "Significantly, Tyeb's icon of choice whether Kali or Durga Mahishasuramardini has invariably been the samhara-murti, the warlike deity embodying destruction, which he prefers over the shanta-murti, the benign deity in tranquility. His quest has been for an imagery that can convey the extremity of conflict, of strife, of schism, without in the slightest way suggesting a literal explanation" ("Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta's Art" in Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 18, 19).

Summer vacations spent with his grandmother in Calcutta might have provided the artist with early inspiration to use the figure of Kali as a symbol of the inbred, societal violence he decried, but it was his residency at Santiniketan in the mid 1980s that cemented its place in his art. As the artist explained, "I've lived with the Kali image for more than three years before even thinking of putting it on the canvas. It's a fantastic image…It's a primordial image. I've always wanted to paint a mother Goddess...At Santiniketan in Bengal I could feel the presence of Kali and Durga ("In Conversation with Yashodhara Dalmia", Ibid., p. 346).

For Mehta, Kali was both a harbinger of destruction, and a portent of the end of violence in her ability to contain and destroy ignorance and malevolence. One of only six paintings of Kali that the artist executed, the present lot equally illuminates the creative and destructive powers, the forgiveness and the vengeance, that her figure represents. Although her presence is as magnetic and commanding as in his other full-length and bust-portraits of her, here she is rendered devoid of her characteristic blood- red mouth and fiery tongue. While the "…Kali image is powerful and virulent, the ample maternal stomach at the same time has a nurturing function. Kali simultaneously creates as she destroys. It is as if the long years of flayed and hurtling forms are finally contained and transformed into a cosmic act" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 116).

This 1998 canvas, the last Mehta painted in the series, is executed in a limited palette of olive green and brown. Here, the deity, like the artist's other figures, is born from the unfinished, intersecting lines and precisely defined fields of contrasting colour that are the trademark of his works from this period. Directly engaging his viewers with uncomfortable questions about the causes and effects of brutality, Mehta uses this canvas to create spaces in which they can question the role of violence in society and in their own lives. As Hoskote explains, the deities like Kali that he paints "…are not well-behaved statues who remain confined to the hushed corridors of the museum; their seismic rage still expresses itself in the periodic churning that Indian society undergoes as it attempts to establish a national modernity for itself" ("Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta's Art" in Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 36).

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