A nation’s sketch
By Narendra Raghunath
Published: 12th July 2009 07:02 AM
Last Updated: 15th May 2012 10:38 PM
It is ironic that when it came to popular imagination Tyeb Mehta shared his space with M F Husain. For, one was a reclusive loner who resisted the temptations of the art market, the other has always been famously flamboyant. But at the end of the day, if not for artistic merit, certainly in general perception, the huge money his works fetched changed Mehta’s image forever.
It all happened in 2002 when Celebration was sold at the Christie’s. The most thing striking about this Mehta triptych was the price: $317,500 (Rs 1.5 crore) — the highest sum for an Indian painting at an international auction. And, perhaps more significantly, that it set off the great Indian art boom.
This singular achievement in the evening of his life apart, Mehta wasn’t alone at the start of his artistic career. He was from early days a close associate of contemporary artists Akbar Padamsee and Ram Kumar. Together their Progressive Artists’ Group represented that vibrant era of Bombay. In fact, it reverberates as “modernism” even
today in the heart of Indian art.
F N Souza, whose works also went on to figure later in the list of most
expensive Indian paintings, had in 1949 declared in the catalogue of the group’s debut exhibition that “Today we paint with absolute freedom for content and technique, almost anarchic, save that
we are governed by one or two sound elemental and eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic co-ordination and colour composition.”
This new course they charted out with the modern European sensibility within the revivalist Bengal school and Victorian academic art certainly changed the way art was looked at in India. Suddenly, in art, “taboos” were no longer untouchable. And, piquantly, a vital part of this was coming from someone hailing from an orthodox Shia community — in Gujarat. Born in 1925 as a Dawoodi Bohra at Kapadvanj in Kheda district, Mehta had begun his career at a film laboratory in pre-Independent Bombay.
S H Raza, another highly-priced artist these days, had recalled in a 1984 interview (to Bombay magazine) that a hope for a better understanding of art was what he had in common with Mehta — “besides our youth and lack of means”. They shared “a sense of searching and we fought the material world…. The works of the French Impressionists and the German Expressionists inspired us and we were particularly indebted to Irving Stone’s book Lust for Life, on Vincent Van Gogh.’’
From those early days of romantic idealism, many of them moved on, some of them lost out. And a few of them remained unchanged — like
Mehta. He kept his art at a nostalgic altar where the sanctity of the intention was unquestionable. Even in an interview, only weeks before his death on July 2, he said, “I do not paint for money, or for what people think of me or of my work. I am not part of this hyped up ‘art world’. Yet, this changing world outside my window is reflected in my work. I paint of my times, but I am not of this time.”
This detachment of an artist from his subject is not surprising if one takes the trail of Mehta’s work. One may find a great concern for the human condition in all his paintings, but there’s also the coldness of the surgeon’s knife that cuts through those explorations. A 1971-72 exhibition catalogue of his (at Kunika Chemould Art Centre) carries a quote of the late French Expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky: “… the most intense coldness is the highest tragedy. And this is cosmic tragedy, in which the human element is only one vibration, one of the contributing voices and in which the centre is shifted to a sphere that approaches the divine.”
Nothing better explains his not-so-common attitude towards his art. But then, this detachment also led Mehta to destroy more work than he preserved. “For every painting of Tyeb’s that came out, he destroyed seven or eight paintings,” recalls Arun Vadehra, his friend and gallerist who, for the last two decades, consigned all his paintings for sale. Mehta, however, is one of those few Indian artists who kept reinventing his own style with a newfound vigour.
The School of Paris and post-war despair of English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) did influence his work, but the Kandinskyian concerns of space, splits and implications are also equally prominent in his work. From his early “Trussed bull” series of the 1950s, figurative work like Head and torn matte-finished semi-abstract paintings like Falling figures, All Is Always Now, Reclining figure and Situation of the ’60s, “Diagonal” series of the ’70s, the Santiniketan Triptych of the ’80s and his last anchoring at the Mahishasura and onwards, Mehta handled his subject with a clinical precision. All the same, as a genuine human being who once attended to sick people in Bombay hospitals, his concern for human sufferings remained intact.
In ’69, carried away by a mood swing, Mehta thought he had hit the dead end of his artistic explorations, and swung his brush across the canvas with a black stroke. That only revealed the enigma of diagonals to him. On a philosophical note, Mehta later considered it as an equivalent to the biblical term ‘cleave’ that at once joins and divides. Thereafter, within those signature diagonals, he explained the history of common man and his encounters with suffering for a long time to come.
If artists are born as social response in any culture, Mehta still exemplifies the norm best in India. His works have always been intertwined with the historical build-up of his nation. The mind-boggling auction prices that made him rich in his autumn are a minor matter while looking at his artistic merit.
The writer is an Ahmedabad-based artist. narendraraghunath@gmail.com
