Tyeb Mehta (b. 1925)

Ranjit Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 231 illustrated

The painting is in excellent condition. The verticle lines visible in the orange sections of the catalogue illustration are a printing error and not part of the original.
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'Mehta has been loyal to the human figure, recognizing man as always being at the centre of the universe.  His art is that of the sensitive, contemplative, and mature individual, caught in the turmoil and pain of life but refusing to react to it with hysteria.  Even in this painting, Falling Figure with Bird, we notice the signs of struggle and the traces of distress beneath the splendid reconciliation of the contending forces of man and bird.' (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005).

Tyeb Mehta's career has spanned several decades, styles and media but his first foray into the art world was in 1944 as a cinematographer, and it was almost three years later when due to pre-partition riots it became difficult for him to travel to his work, that he decided to enroll at the J. J. School of Art. There S. H. Raza introduced him to M. F. Husain and Krishen Khanna, and although he was never a member he became loosely associated with the Progressive Artists' Group.  He recalls '...we learned and tried to understand paintings through each other.  Gradually I realised that painting offered a world of expression, all its own.  I forgot about films and became obsessed with learning what painting was all about.' (T. Mehta, Celebration – Tyeb Mehta, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1996).

Mehta like many artists of his generation, had been witness to the tragic events that took place in India during and after Partition and his memories of this period clearly had an immense impact on him and the vocabulary of his art. 'The tremendous sense of release and exhilaration which swept the art world in the wake of world War II was felt as strongly in India.  The Paris of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Leger and the England of Moore, Nicholson and Sutherland beckoned.  Souza and Bakre embarked for London followed several years later by Chandra and Mehta...Having set out to explore the more fertile regions of contemporary art in the West and to establish themselves within it with varying degrees of success, basically to prove to themselves that Indian art had indeed come of age in the context of world art, the Indian artists could not ignore the persistent call of their homeland....  Understandably most of their work took the form of exposure and protest.  The trauma of social changes; the tensions of a feudal, cast ridden, tradition-bound society groping towards a secular, democratic ideal; the violence and bitterness of internal divisions and of economic uncertainty are all reflected in works of art which writhe with a sense of humiliation, despair and anger.  In contemporary Indian art there are few signs of indifference or apathy towards crucial contemporary issues.  One can feel the anguished effort of these artists to identify with the plight of the masses and to hammer out a pictorial language true to the rawness of the times.  They are aware of contradictions and pressures of a society in a painful stage of transition.  Intellectually sophisticated, sensitive articulate, their works reveal a touching intent of purpose and a searing sense of honesty.  Whatever course it takes the expression of sensibility is bound to be provocative and challenging, despite superficial resemblances contemporary Indian art is not a reworking of tendencies in the West, nor is it a withdrawal into a romantic past.  Insofar as it reflects the anguish and doubts of the dislocated Indian persona and seeks to tear off its own illusions, it shows an aspiration towards the seeking out of truth within the tangled wreckage of contemporary society.  Inevitably many of the concerns, styles and uncertainties current in the art of the West are reflected.  Yet as so often was the case with previous art these outside influences are absorbed and transmuted.' (D. Elliot, V. Musgrave, E. Alkazi, Introduction, India: Myth and Reality, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1982, p. 3).

Mehta experienced personally the 'tangled wreckage of contemporary society' and vividly remembers the violence that he witnessed during his childhood in India.  He states, 'one incident left a deep impression on me. At the time of Partition I was living on Mohammedali Road... I remember 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.  That violence gave me a clue about the emotion I want to paint. That violence has stuck in my mind.' Almost twenty years later in 1965 during the War with Pakistan the artist visited the frontlines as part of a government sponsored project, the experience left a deep impression upon the artist and perhaps the horrors of war reignited his memories of Partition for it was in the same year that he painted the first of the Falling Figure Series.  The work won him a Gold medal at India's first Triennale following which he was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Grant to work and study in the US. After this visit to New York his canvases undergo a reorganisation both in terms of composition and the application of color.  Large flat planes of color dominate the work, accompanied by figures executed with a sparseness of line that becomes a hallmark of his later works.  Mehta returned to the Falling Figure Series in the 1980's upon his return from Santiniketan where he was an artist in residence. It was during this period that the first of the Falling Figure with Bird works appeared. The current lot from 2003 represents one of the latest examples of the series and is notable for its masterful control of contrasting tones of red and majenta with pristine whites.

'Mehta has spent many years in the contemplation of suffering.  He has condensed long histories of violence and melancholia into the most austere forms; he has delivered the freight of trauma through isolated figures delineated in planes of flat color that vibrate against one another without discreet intervals of tonal shading' (R. Hoskote, "The Alchemical Sacrifice," Tyeb Mehta: Paintings, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1998).

Much has been said about the formal affinity between the works of Mehta and Bacon. It is most clearly witnessed in works such as Play (1989) where a seated figure painted in Mehta's hallmark style of fragmented planes of color is intersected by a figure in the style of Bacon.  Mehta states "when a painter paints, inspired by someone else's work, he executes it according to his own vision.  I am actually more or less introducing Bacon's image and juxtaposing it with my own. "  The salient feature of this Baconesque appearance is that Mehta 'absorbs and transmutes' this western imagery into his own personal vision creating an internal dialogue between two styles within a single work.  As Hoskote suggests Mehta presents the fleshy bleeding form of a Baconesque figure almost in combat with the more austere remote form of his own style.  'May this not be a graphic image of the Indian apprentice learning to overcome the European Master on his own ground, to charge the inherited idiom with its own meanings, and so to re-write the rules of the game, thus inventing an altogether new game?' (Ranjit Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 16).

Perhaps less well documented in relation to Mehta's work is the fact that the falling figure contained powerful symbolic value for Bacon too. In Bacon's celebrated work Triptych (1976) the central panel is dominated by the figure of a headless body savaged by a swirling bird of prey whose wingspan spirals downwards .  The Prometheus figure from the Bacon work is reminiscent of the headless armless goddess identified as Leto or Hestia among the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.  In Bacon's interpretation the form is flayed beyond recognition, appearing more as meat than a human figure, itself reminiscent of Soutine's depictions of beef in a slaughterhouse.  The unusual combination of the imagery of a slaughterhouse with that of a falling figure combines two important symbols of Mehta's own artistic vocabulary, that of the slaughtered bull and the falling figure and so it is inevitable that Mehta would have felt an affinity towards this type of imagery. However, it seems unlikely that Mehta drew his entire inspiration from the same western sources as Bacon, his treatment of the subject is certainly very different from Bacon's throughout its various appearances in his work.  In most instances the Bird and Falling figure seem more closely intertwined than in Bacon's interpretation and both characters seem to be involved in this crisis moment of frozen freefall.  Hoskote sees the falling figure in Mehta's work as a symbol of 'The Fall' of mankind which is clearly intimated in his work of the same title and Georgina and Ulli Beir have suggested the combined form of bird and human is a reinterpretation of the Icarus figure but it seems unlikely that so much of the symbolic value is drawn from Western sources. For birds make common appearances in Indian myth cycles too, Vishnu rides his mount Garuda a bird who helps in the numerous battles between good and evil. Garuda is invoked as a symbol of violent force, of speed and martial prowess.  Garuda's own nephew Jatayu battles Ravana in the epic of the Ramayana.  Jatayu hears Sita's cries for help as Ravana abducts her and immediately flies to her aid.  A deadly aerial battle that ensues,  Jatayu fights valiantly against the superior figure of Ravana who eventually cuts off one of his wings, but the bird refuses to give up and continues to fight until he finally loses his second wing and spirals to earth.  Wounded and dying he preserves his breath until he is able to inform Rama of his wife's abduction. This doomed aerial combat seems to fit the imagery of Mehta's works, the 'doomed heroism'of 'thwarted angels' that Hoskote identifies in these figures and equally blends perfectly with his incorporation of Hindu myths so apparent in his other works like Mahisasura and his Kali series.

Figures are constants in Mehta's work and nearly all of them are linked by the distortion of form through violent activity. The figure is either the victim of violence or has the pent up primal potential for acts of violence. In the current work the figure plunges through darkness with limbs intertwined with a bird of monumental proportions. Yet despite the distortion of limbs and the inherent violence of the imagery, the potency of Tyeb's work lies in the balance of harmonious tones and lines within a deceptively simple composition. Both Bacon and Mehta elevate their protagonists to epic existential proportions but through different means and to different effect. Both use ancient mythological imagery as an 'armature' on which to hang their own feelings, concerning the fate of Man in the contemporary world, but whilst the figures produced by Bacon are dripping with the fleshy constraints of the earthly realm, Mehta's central figures are elevated to a mythical realm where the violence appears serene, like an act of final sacrifice or ultimate salvation and the anguish of the central character demands our pathos.

'A primary experience of shock resonates at the core of Tyeb Mehta's figuration.  It is difficult to come away from one of his paintings without sensing a disquiet that is barely held in check by the seam of the line; an anguish bursts against the skin of the pigment.  Nothing can completely still this primary experience of shock...  Standing before these often monumental-scale frames we bear helpless witness to the predicaments into which the artist knits his singular, isolated protagonists.' (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 3).