“Art can shock, and thereby inspire recognition and change,” wrote artist, writer, and doctor Gieve Patel in his 1989 essay “Contemporary Indian Painting.” Among the six painters Patel examined, the idea resonates most strongly with Tyeb Mehta, whose work confronted the violence and instability of modern Indian life while redefining contemporary painting in India.
Born in 1925 in a village in the western Indian state of Gujarat, Mehta studied at the famed J. J. School of Art in Bombay. He later joined the Progressive Artists Group (PAG), formed in the aftermath of India’s independence and the violent Partition that divided the subcontinent in two. Its members included luminaries such as M. F. Husain, F. N. Souza, and S. H. Raza, and their mandate was to build an artistic voice for a newly independent nation.
Like many of his peers, Mehta left for London in 1959 before returning to India in 1965, when he received an award at the country’s first Triennial. That same year, a Rockefeller Fellowship took him to the United States, and his work was included in the exhibition Art Now in India, organized by the Arts Council of England. Apart from painting and drawing, he also dabbled in filmmaking, winning accolades for his short film Koodal.
Mehta’s centenary year has been marked by two major milestones. The first is a large retrospective—incidentally, his first—currently on view at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Meanwhile, his Trussed Bull became the second most expensive work by a contemporary Indian artist sold at auction when it sold for $7.27 million last year.
For much of his life, Mehta remained overshadowed by the commercial success of his fellow PAG artists. In recent years, however, the value of his work has risen sharply. Writers Mukti Khaire and Daniel Wadhwani noted this shift in a 2010 article published in The Academy of Management Journal. Here they highlighted the 2005 sale of a Mehta painting at Christie’s for $1.6 million, which “easily trounc[ed] the Sotheby’s record from the day before and more than tripl[ed] the record for a Mehta work at auction.”
Although Mehta painted from the 1950s through the 2010s, it’s his later abstract work that has gained particular attention in recent years. Only a few hundred of his paintings survive today, as he destroyed many works he didn’t consider worthy of presenting to the world. The scarcity of his canvases has certainly contributed to the rise in their prices, but it also reflects a growing appreciation for his singular style.
In a 2014 paper for The Art Bulletin, Rebecca M. Brown, a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art and visual culture at Johns Hopkins University, offers one explanation for Mehta’s growing popularity. Brown focuses on the Festival of India, organized in the United States in the 1980s, as a tool for political and economic cooperation between the two countries, with contemporary art playing a central role. She describes Rabindranath Tagore’s drawings and Tyeb Mehta’s films, in particular, as “markers of a contemporary sensibility coeval with modernist engagements across the twentieth century.”
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Art historian R. Siva Kumar, however, differs in his analysis. In a 1999 essay published in Art Journal, he contrasts the distinct language of Western modernism—which pursued the avant-garde in order to “undermine the post-Renaissance Western realist tradition”—with that of Indian modernism. Shaped by post-colonial imperatives, Indian modernism instead embraced change through the “assimilation of the Other, rather than through the rejection of the past.” Indian artists practicing at this time adopted the principles of international modernism while remaining grounded in local artistic traditions. In this context, Kumar describes Mehta’s work as “largely derived from a combination of Cubist means and expressionist goals.”
Mehta’s recurring motifs, like the falling man and trussed bull, were symbols depicting his personal feelings and experiences. He used the diagonal line as a device to define spaces and accord them meaning and importance. With these devices, Mehta depicted an existential loneliness in tune with a postwar modernist world.
Another recurring presence in Mehta’s later work was the figure of the goddess. In a 2014 article published in ARTMargins, art historian, anthropologist, and curator Karin Zitzewitz examines why Mehta and K.G. Subramanyan—despite their widely divergent practices—both turned to the goddess figure around the same time.
Although Mehta was raised as a Dawoodi Bohra Muslim, he chose this Hindu religious figure through his engagement with Expressionism and the humanist worldview associated with modernism. His depictions of Kali, in particular, seem preoccupied with violent power, rendered through large and grotesque forms. The imagery fits well with Mehta’s proclivity to show violence, frequently linked to his witnessing a murder during the Partition riots of 1947–48.
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Gieve Patel similarly describes Mehta’s work as focused on “the depiction of a haunted human being. Sometimes his despair is given expression as an icon of ultimate terror and helplessness, a screaming figure catapulting headfirst into the void.”
Perhaps, though, one must turn to Mehta himself to understand where his artistic language stems from, and why it remains popular to this day. In a 1984 interview with art critic, writer, and researcher, N. Ty-Tomkins Seth, Mehta drew a distinction between subject matter and content:
Subject matter is something which exists outside the painter-observer. But content is an emotive, internal response…In a painting where subject matter predominates, it is you who are reading the painting. In a painting where content predominates, it is the painting itself which looks to you. As you come to terms with form, even content becomes suggestive rather than direct and I think that is the essence of art.
It is perhaps the universality of Mehta’s content that continues to sustain the appeal of his work.
