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拍品專文
“Tyeb Mehta is striving for simple, clean solutions to the problems of painting. This simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve” (G. and U. Beier, ‘Falling Figures – The Art of Tyeb Mehta’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Sydney, no. 23, January 1982, p. 79).
Over the course of his six decade long career, Tyeb Mehta strove to distil the existential struggles of humanity in the twentieth century into powerful pictorial form. Recognized as one of India’s greatest modern masters, Mehta began his career as a filmmaker before turning to painting after befriending members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay. This unique trajectory sets Mehta apart as a quintessential image-maker. Working with a carefully restricted repertoire of motifs, he returned to these images repeatedly over the years in order to refine, compress and intensify their meaning. From his early images of trussed bulls that underline the plight of the helpless animal in Bombay’s slaughterhouses, to fractured and falling figures, diagonal slashes, battling deities and disenfranchised rickshaw pullers, Mehta’s paintings articulate struggle on both cosmic and pragmatic registers.
From the 1950s onward, Mehta experimented with different stylistic devices, including flattened and simultaneous perspectives, the juxtaposition of linear and voluminous representations of form and varying frontal and profiled lines of sight. A comprehensive retrospective of Mehta’s body of work is currently on view in the exhibition Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (with the Lightness of Being) at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, offering viewers an encyclopaedic look at the development of his unique visual vocabulary.
Early in his career, Mehta’s images were rendered through visceral, often violent brushwork, with thick impasto and a pronounced physicality. Painterly force was deployed directly to convey trauma and suffering. Works from this period are formally antithetical to the artist’s signature stylized fractured bodies seen in the current lot, a work from 1977 titled Gesture, a difference that reflects a decisive turning point in Mehta’s artistic development.
This change followed the artist’s year-long stay in New York on a Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship in 1968. Immersed in the contemporary American art scene and particularly affected by the work of artists such as Barnett Newman, Mehta moved away from expressionistic facture toward pristine planes of saturated color applied to surfaces on which no brushstroke is apparent. Mehta recalls the significance of this moment in his artistic development, noting, “My encounter with minimalist art was a revelation. I had seen minimalist reproductions previously, but I hadn't seen the works in the original. Had I not seen the original, I might have dismissed many of them as gimmicks, just another tricky idea. But when I saw my first original [Barnett Newman], for example, I had such an incredible emotional response to it. The canvas had no image, but the way the paint had been applied, the way the scale had been worked out, the whole area proportioned – there was something about it which is inexpressible. Let’s say there must have been a point of saturation in my work before I went to New York, which my confrontation with the contemporary art scene brought to the surface. I was open to new ideas. About the same time, I became interested in using pure color. Normally brush marks suggest areas of direction. I wanted to avoid all this to bring elements down to such a minimal level that the image alone would be sufficient to speak for itself” (Artist statement, N. Ty-Tomkins Seth, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 342).
Following his return from New York, Mehta developed a new formal language grounded in reduction, control and precision. Among its most recognizable elements was the diagonal, a device he employed to activate pictorial space and destabilize the relationship between figure and field. As the artist himself described it, “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” (Artist statement, G. and U. Beier, ‘Falling Figures – The Art of Tyeb Mehta’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Sydney, no. 23, January 1982, p. 79).
Critical responses to these works recognized their psychological and metaphysical weight. Writing on Mehta’s work of this period, fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan noted that “what strikes one immediately in these works is the strictly formal geometrical arrangement, or invocation of space-colour, and the line embodying the figure pulled apart like a doll and put together again – laid flat, defining, so to speak, the iconographic area [...] What appears at first glance as a formal exercise in relating line to colour on a flat plane suddenly becomes very disturbing. While one was immediately moved by the angst portrayed in his former works, one could immediately reach out and share the unfathomable terror, the unrelieved sadness of man alienated; the present works enter the realm of the mystical; terror, pathos and sorrow are objectivised entities, masks, implacable deities, setting up a grotesque tableau. You enter a world of magic and are enthralled by the elemental dance of the emotions, which freeze and cease to speak the moment you seek to identify yourself with them. What Tyeb has achieved is a double transformation. In his former phase, he has isolated and insulated man’s loneliness, protecting it, so to speak, from the profane. Now he has set it up in its own right, impervious to human touch, yet threatening man’s complaisance” (J. Swaminathan, G. and U. Beier, ‘Falling Figures – The Art of Tyeb Mehta’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Paddington, no. 23, January 1982, p. 81).
While the diagonal became a defining feature of Mehta’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not an end in itself. By the middle of the decade, its force had been internalized and refined, giving rise to a brief but critical body of work centered on figures in the act of movement, fissure, and gesticulation. These paintings mark a moment of heightened compression in Mehta’s practice, in which movement, fracture and emotion are registered through the body rather than declared through overt compositional devices. In works from the mid-1970s, the diagonal is delicately refined into geometric schematic lines, interrupted by the figure or figures in the foreground. The diagonal becomes a visually modulated echo, entwined with the figure. As the artist’s biographer, Ranjit Hoskote has observed of this mature phase of Mehta’s career, “Tyeb treats figure and field as interlocked and not separate entities” (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 4). Mehta himself stated, “The problem with us is that we see the figure. But if you see the painting and forget about the figure, you will be seeing forms relating to each other” (Artist statement, Y. Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 354).
Painted in 1977, Gesture belongs to this rare series, of which only a small handful of works have been documented. The composition presents discombobulated figures with flailing limbs set against a fractured pictorial field. Mehta’s schematic lines form multiple conflicting perspectives. The center is everywhere and nowhere, just as the emotional impact of Gesture is both external and internal. Writing about Mehta’s figuration shortly before the present canvas was painted, Pria Karunakar notes, “The human image itself is subjected to tremendous disorganization and reassemblage, bits scattered around and put together. They induce a feeling of disorientation and yet the lonely gesticulating hands are tender and open, or splayed for support. They act very definitely as visual clues both to the mood and to the structural reading of the canvas” (P. Karunakar, ‘Tyeb Mehta: Abstraction and Image’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 17, New Delhi, April 1974, p. 31).
In Gesture, diagonal pressures remain present but precise, operating as directional forces and perspectival lines rather than dominant structuring devices. Mehta’s use of white for sections of figure and background means that they are inseparable, their fractures echoing across the picture plane. Mehta animates these dislocated, weightless forms through gesture; bodies rendered in coral, lavender, and white appear entwined, limbs intersecting in a manner that suggests both intimacy and rupture. The ambiguity is deliberate. What may initially read as two figures in embrace can equally be understood as a single figure in dual poses of gesticulation or, at its extreme, spliced apart – an image of existential division held in suspension. Mehta’s mature works manage to capture this cosmic moment in serene silence. As Hoskote has written, “each of Tyeb’s paintings acts as a silent movie [...] the artist leaves it to us to imagine the horror of sound” (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 20).
This restraint reflects Mehta’s conviction that meaning in painting must be suggested rather than declared. As he once remarked, “Painters who are over concerned with content burn themselves out [...] my experience is now transformed into colour and form. When you transpose your ideas into colours and forms, you are making a suggestion. A suggestion is stronger than a direct message” (Artist statement, G. and U. Beier, ‘Falling Figures – The Art of Tyeb Mehta’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Paddington, no. 23, January 1982, p. 79).
The artist K.G. Subramanyan perfectly captures the magic of Tyeb Mehta’s work, which is epitomized in Gesture. He writes, “They snare you into a search. Those unindividual faces that seem benign or sad, those heavy limbs that oscillate in mute gesture, those body postures that combine both elegance and awkwardness – they hold you captive with their teasing configurations. Clear, brilliant, tantalizingly visual, almost like blown-up cameos, in the center of their impact they carry a message for the heart” (K.G. Subramanyan, Celebration: Tyeb Mehta, Delhi, Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996).
Over the course of his six decade long career, Tyeb Mehta strove to distil the existential struggles of humanity in the twentieth century into powerful pictorial form. Recognized as one of India’s greatest modern masters, Mehta began his career as a filmmaker before turning to painting after befriending members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay. This unique trajectory sets Mehta apart as a quintessential image-maker. Working with a carefully restricted repertoire of motifs, he returned to these images repeatedly over the years in order to refine, compress and intensify their meaning. From his early images of trussed bulls that underline the plight of the helpless animal in Bombay’s slaughterhouses, to fractured and falling figures, diagonal slashes, battling deities and disenfranchised rickshaw pullers, Mehta’s paintings articulate struggle on both cosmic and pragmatic registers.
From the 1950s onward, Mehta experimented with different stylistic devices, including flattened and simultaneous perspectives, the juxtaposition of linear and voluminous representations of form and varying frontal and profiled lines of sight. A comprehensive retrospective of Mehta’s body of work is currently on view in the exhibition Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (with the Lightness of Being) at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, offering viewers an encyclopaedic look at the development of his unique visual vocabulary.
Early in his career, Mehta’s images were rendered through visceral, often violent brushwork, with thick impasto and a pronounced physicality. Painterly force was deployed directly to convey trauma and suffering. Works from this period are formally antithetical to the artist’s signature stylized fractured bodies seen in the current lot, a work from 1977 titled Gesture, a difference that reflects a decisive turning point in Mehta’s artistic development.
This change followed the artist’s year-long stay in New York on a Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship in 1968. Immersed in the contemporary American art scene and particularly affected by the work of artists such as Barnett Newman, Mehta moved away from expressionistic facture toward pristine planes of saturated color applied to surfaces on which no brushstroke is apparent. Mehta recalls the significance of this moment in his artistic development, noting, “My encounter with minimalist art was a revelation. I had seen minimalist reproductions previously, but I hadn't seen the works in the original. Had I not seen the original, I might have dismissed many of them as gimmicks, just another tricky idea. But when I saw my first original [Barnett Newman], for example, I had such an incredible emotional response to it. The canvas had no image, but the way the paint had been applied, the way the scale had been worked out, the whole area proportioned – there was something about it which is inexpressible. Let’s say there must have been a point of saturation in my work before I went to New York, which my confrontation with the contemporary art scene brought to the surface. I was open to new ideas. About the same time, I became interested in using pure color. Normally brush marks suggest areas of direction. I wanted to avoid all this to bring elements down to such a minimal level that the image alone would be sufficient to speak for itself” (Artist statement, N. Ty-Tomkins Seth, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 342).
Following his return from New York, Mehta developed a new formal language grounded in reduction, control and precision. Among its most recognizable elements was the diagonal, a device he employed to activate pictorial space and destabilize the relationship between figure and field. As the artist himself described it, “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” (Artist statement, G. and U. Beier, ‘Falling Figures – The Art of Tyeb Mehta’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Sydney, no. 23, January 1982, p. 79).
Critical responses to these works recognized their psychological and metaphysical weight. Writing on Mehta’s work of this period, fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan noted that “what strikes one immediately in these works is the strictly formal geometrical arrangement, or invocation of space-colour, and the line embodying the figure pulled apart like a doll and put together again – laid flat, defining, so to speak, the iconographic area [...] What appears at first glance as a formal exercise in relating line to colour on a flat plane suddenly becomes very disturbing. While one was immediately moved by the angst portrayed in his former works, one could immediately reach out and share the unfathomable terror, the unrelieved sadness of man alienated; the present works enter the realm of the mystical; terror, pathos and sorrow are objectivised entities, masks, implacable deities, setting up a grotesque tableau. You enter a world of magic and are enthralled by the elemental dance of the emotions, which freeze and cease to speak the moment you seek to identify yourself with them. What Tyeb has achieved is a double transformation. In his former phase, he has isolated and insulated man’s loneliness, protecting it, so to speak, from the profane. Now he has set it up in its own right, impervious to human touch, yet threatening man’s complaisance” (J. Swaminathan, G. and U. Beier, ‘Falling Figures – The Art of Tyeb Mehta’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Paddington, no. 23, January 1982, p. 81).
While the diagonal became a defining feature of Mehta’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not an end in itself. By the middle of the decade, its force had been internalized and refined, giving rise to a brief but critical body of work centered on figures in the act of movement, fissure, and gesticulation. These paintings mark a moment of heightened compression in Mehta’s practice, in which movement, fracture and emotion are registered through the body rather than declared through overt compositional devices. In works from the mid-1970s, the diagonal is delicately refined into geometric schematic lines, interrupted by the figure or figures in the foreground. The diagonal becomes a visually modulated echo, entwined with the figure. As the artist’s biographer, Ranjit Hoskote has observed of this mature phase of Mehta’s career, “Tyeb treats figure and field as interlocked and not separate entities” (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 4). Mehta himself stated, “The problem with us is that we see the figure. But if you see the painting and forget about the figure, you will be seeing forms relating to each other” (Artist statement, Y. Dalmia, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 354).
Painted in 1977, Gesture belongs to this rare series, of which only a small handful of works have been documented. The composition presents discombobulated figures with flailing limbs set against a fractured pictorial field. Mehta’s schematic lines form multiple conflicting perspectives. The center is everywhere and nowhere, just as the emotional impact of Gesture is both external and internal. Writing about Mehta’s figuration shortly before the present canvas was painted, Pria Karunakar notes, “The human image itself is subjected to tremendous disorganization and reassemblage, bits scattered around and put together. They induce a feeling of disorientation and yet the lonely gesticulating hands are tender and open, or splayed for support. They act very definitely as visual clues both to the mood and to the structural reading of the canvas” (P. Karunakar, ‘Tyeb Mehta: Abstraction and Image’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 17, New Delhi, April 1974, p. 31).
In Gesture, diagonal pressures remain present but precise, operating as directional forces and perspectival lines rather than dominant structuring devices. Mehta’s use of white for sections of figure and background means that they are inseparable, their fractures echoing across the picture plane. Mehta animates these dislocated, weightless forms through gesture; bodies rendered in coral, lavender, and white appear entwined, limbs intersecting in a manner that suggests both intimacy and rupture. The ambiguity is deliberate. What may initially read as two figures in embrace can equally be understood as a single figure in dual poses of gesticulation or, at its extreme, spliced apart – an image of existential division held in suspension. Mehta’s mature works manage to capture this cosmic moment in serene silence. As Hoskote has written, “each of Tyeb’s paintings acts as a silent movie [...] the artist leaves it to us to imagine the horror of sound” (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 20).
This restraint reflects Mehta’s conviction that meaning in painting must be suggested rather than declared. As he once remarked, “Painters who are over concerned with content burn themselves out [...] my experience is now transformed into colour and form. When you transpose your ideas into colours and forms, you are making a suggestion. A suggestion is stronger than a direct message” (Artist statement, G. and U. Beier, ‘Falling Figures – The Art of Tyeb Mehta’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Paddington, no. 23, January 1982, p. 79).
The artist K.G. Subramanyan perfectly captures the magic of Tyeb Mehta’s work, which is epitomized in Gesture. He writes, “They snare you into a search. Those unindividual faces that seem benign or sad, those heavy limbs that oscillate in mute gesture, those body postures that combine both elegance and awkwardness – they hold you captive with their teasing configurations. Clear, brilliant, tantalizingly visual, almost like blown-up cameos, in the center of their impact they carry a message for the heart” (K.G. Subramanyan, Celebration: Tyeb Mehta, Delhi, Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996).