Tyeb Mehta
Modern
Any conversation in the Indian art market will inevitably lead to Tyeb Mehta, not surprising as his painting was the first to achieve over two crores in a Christie’s auction in 2002 and this was a major achievement for the art fraternity in India. The media predictably went ballistic, and the only person who was calm and grounded was the artist himself! And this defines Tyeb Mehta as an artist who was focused on his art and did not let the changing situations affect his way of work. Of course, by this time Tyeb was already seventy-seven years old and had spent over five decades creating works.
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If we look at Tyeb’s journey as an artist, every decision seems to have been made after careful deliberation, his family was in the film business, and he had already worked as a film editor, but he enrolled in Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai when he was twenty-two years old to be able to take up art direction. However, while at the art school he befriended Akbar Padamsee, V S Gaitonde and he was engulfed in the world of painting, and he chose a difficult path for himself.
In the early years of his career, he moved to London so that he could see the paintings firsthand. He moved with his wife Sakina and children and lived there between 1959 to 1965, and though he had a successful exhibition at the Bear Gallery in 1961, it was a struggle to make ends meet and he could not dedicate himself to painting full time, he chose to return to India. His wife Sakina took up a job and Tyeb was now painting full time and in a few years, Tyeb was awarded the prestigious Rockefeller Scholarship in 1968 and he spent a year traveling across the USA.
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It is interesting that Tyeb was in Mumbai at a time when the Progressive Artists were very active, he was close to them, but never joined the group formally, or any other for that matter, he preferred to find his own path. So much so that despite his close friends painting in the abstract style, he continued to paint the human figure. He struggled to find the pictorial style that conveyed his anguish and beliefs without relying on the narrative element or an overtly emotional statement.
Tyeb is believed to have destroyed completed paintings if they failed to capture the precise vision. In fact it is believed that he arrived at the use of the diagonal in his paintings as a pictorial device when he flung a pot of paint across a finished painting in a fit of frustration. He would continue to use the diagonal in his paintings till the early 1970’s after which he resolved his paintings using disjointed planes. Tyeb throughout his career worked with a limited number of themes – the trussed bull, the falling figure, the rickshaw puller, Kali, Durga amongst his most iconic ones. And rarely did he paint large groups of figures and when he did, they were masterpieces, like the Santiniketan Triptych of 1986 and the Celebration 1995. Apart from paintings, Tyeb also worked in the medium of printmaking and a few sculptures. And of course his most celebrated film from 1970, Koodal which won him the film critics award, it is short sixteen minute film and captures the concerns that recur in his paintings, that of violence, life and death.
Tyeb lived in Mumbai and passed away in 2009, his family has set up a foundation in his name which programmes conversations on art.
