Important Notice

Although Tyeb Mehta dramatically reworked his artistic vocabulary and the way in which he handled his subjects after spending a year in the United States on a Rockefeller III Foundation Fellowship in 1968-69, he always remained true to the human form and his initial expressionist idiom. As he explained, “I am not a minimalist or abstract painter…my work is still expressionist. The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to” (as quoted... Although Tyeb Mehta dramatically reworked his artistic vocabulary and the way in which he handled his subjects after spending a year in the United States on a Rockefeller III Foundation Fellowship in 1968-69, he always remained true to the human form and his initial expressionist idiom. As he explained, “I am not a minimalist or abstract painter…my work is still expressionist. The human figure is my source, what I primarily react to” (as quoted in “In Conversation with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth”, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2005, p. 343).

Before he turned to the sharp lines, bisecting diagonals and flat expanses of colour of his later works, Mehta layered his canvases thickly with expressionist brushstrokes out of which his solitary subjects seemed to be etched. Rather than the explicit violence and fractured forms of his unforgiving goddesses and falling figures, these men and women were apprehensive and unmoving, their features indiscernible and their bodies aged and flaccid. Like passive victims, they seemed to have surrendered to their fate and to the violence of their time.

Speaking about the artist’s figures, Ranjit Hoskote notes, “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). The seated figure in the present lot, executed in 1962, speaks to this deep-seated existential anguish. Standing testimony to Mehta’s preoccupation with the figure, this featureless woman, seated on the edge of a frame, seems caught between the deep vermillion interior of her past and what lies ahead of her beyond the surface of this work.

Part of the esteemed collection of Lord Michael Croft, the present lot originally hung at Croft Castle in Herefordshire, England. Often referred to as one of the most respected collections of contemporary art in Europe, the Croft Collection was built through the Second Lord Croft’s various associations with artists and art institutions over his distinguished career, including the Artist’s Refugee Committee, the Contemporary Arts Society and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Lord Croft exhibited several drawings and paintings from his collection at public exhibitions, and also hosted many private viewings of the works at Croft Castle.

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