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Lot 46

 

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

The six decades of Mehta’s artistic career can be traced through the presence of an evolving central figure that is often distorted, caught in free fall, a flurry of body parts without a clear shape. Though his style underwent significant development over the years from the expressionism of the late 1950s and... “An artist comes to terms with certain images. He arrives at certain conventions by a process of reduction.” - TYEB MEHTA

The six decades of Mehta’s artistic career can be traced through the presence of an evolving central figure that is often distorted, caught in free fall, a flurry of body parts without a clear shape. Though his style underwent significant development over the years from the expressionism of the late 1950s and the 1960s to the minimalism of his later 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)

From his iconic Falling Figure series to the trussed bull, Mehta explored a concise repertoire of subjects through an artistic career marked by quiet intensity. His figures, whether human, animal, or bird, conveyed a sense of disquieting torment and trauma. These figures in crisis were both silent victims and merciless aggressors: unforgiving goddesses fighting demons to the death, browbeaten rickshaw-pullers, defeated bulls trussed and ready for slaughter, and humans and/or birds 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, an iconic subject that 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.

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.” (Hoskote, Gandhi et al., pp. 340-341) This sectarian violence remained the underlying element in his oeuvre. The powerful bull, the lone trapped rickshaw-puller, falling birds and figures, as well as the goddesses Kali and Durga, are all used to express his feelings of bewilderment and anguish about the violence he encountered.

Mehta first explored the idea of the ‘falling figure’ on his return from London in the mid-1960’s, and returned to the theme in the late 1980’s after completing his residency at Santiniketan. The concept of free fall was perhaps inspired by Albert Camus, whose characters drift in a world of sensations, as well as the myth of Icarus and Phaethon, with the hero “being punished for an unwitting transgression, an unintended display of pride or recklessness: thus, the evocation of free fall is also a minatory reminder of the gravity of fate.” (Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p. 17)

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.” (Edward Saywell, Bharat Ratna! Jewels of Modern Indian Art, Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2009-10, p. 11)

In Untitled (Bull on Rickshaw), an exceptionally rare masterwork from 1999, several of the iconic subjects from across Mehta’s oeuvre come together, skillfully distilled into their essential elements. It is an important work that highlights the potency of Mehta’s recurring icons - the falling figure, which is a trussed bull that is set upon a rickshaw, caught in an endless spiral downwards.

The trussed bull and the rickshaw-puller are among Mehta’s earliest and most iconic subjects. For Mehta “the rickshaw is more than a vehicle, it is a sign of bondage.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 52) With the browbeaten figure of the rickshaw-puller, he sought 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 Mehta’s Rickshaw Puller, 2002 - 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.” (Nissim Ezekiel,Tyeb Mehta, New Delhi: Kunika Chemould Art Centre, 1970)

However, in Untitled (Bull on Rickshaw), it is a bull that is depicted writhing on the rickshaw, as opposed to the rickshaw-puller. Mehta was consistently inspired by the iconography of the bull over the course of his career as is evident in the constant reinvention of this beast in his works - from the literal interpretation of a trussed and quartered bull in his works from the 1950s to his well-known series of Mahishasura paintings from the 1990s. “...the bull, with its fiery energy is inescapably doomed to man’s violence. Mehta’s experience at an abattoir in Bombay marked him indelibly; in his art, it achieves metaphoric significance - an animal in the throes of death becomes a symbol for the conflicts of modern life.” (Jhaveri, p. 52)

Unlike the chaotic abyss of his earliest Falling Figure works, the present lot reflects influences of the Colour Field paintings of American Abstractionists like Barnett Newman, whose “monochromatic fields of color and strong vertical dividing lines proved critical for Mehta’s own pictorial vocabulary.” (Saywell, p. 11)

The diagonal, seen in the present lot, is another important element whose introduction marked a seminal moment in the evolution of Mehta’s artistic career. He realised “that the surface could be activated by mobilising its tonal values” when he encountered “the works of artists like Barnett Newman in their use of large Colour Field areas and the decisive division of space” during his stay in the U.S. upon receiving the Rockefeller Fellowship. (Yashodhara Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Triumph of Vision, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 9)

According to Mehta, the diagonal, thus, became a way “to activate a canvas. If I divided it horizontally and vertically, I merely created a preponderance of smaller squares or rectangles. But if I cut the canvas with a diagonal, I immediately created a certain dislocation. I was able to distribute and divide a figure within the two created triangles and automatically disjoint and fragment it. Yet the diagonal maintained an almost centrifugal unity...in fact became a pictorial element in itself.” (Artist quoted in Hoskote, Gandhi et al., p. 343)

In the present lot, the austere planes of colour are dissected by the subtle diagonals of the rickshaw handles, while the abstract use of flattened form and segregated expanses of colour create a harmony, a frozen moment of contemplation before the ensuing cataclysm. It is an unparalleled celebration of the powerful icons and subjects that have come to embody Mehta’s celebrated oeuvre.

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