bull runs into the art bazaar

'seven cities claimed homer dead,

while the living homer begged his bread'

tyeb mehta, the indian canvas artist considered the most prolific figurative artist the country has seen, lives in a small 4th floor apartment sans lift, in the crowded suburd of lokhandwala. his career has seen the changing fortunes of contemporary indian art over the last six decades, from the intelluctual outburst in 1947 to a lifetime of aesthetic and financial struggle, to the burst in the indian art market in the last decade of the 20th century. as the economy galloped forward, art galleries mushroomed, prices skyrocketed and art became a society tag - an affluence to the newly minted rich.

tyeb mehta was born in 1925 in rural gujarat. his family was into the movie business and he too worked as an editor for some struggling years. he left the trade and joined the sir j.j. institute of applied art to become an art director in movies. an insignificant argument with his family members made him walk out of the family with his wife sakina when he was 29. later, while he read and painted at home, sakina had to work outside. she was his greatest supporter in times of all emotions and angst.

it could be said that the partition of 1947 bought out the angst and sufferings of the artist in tyeb. he saw his neighbours bludgeoned to death and it left a permanent and prominent scar in him.the violence gave him a subject - a vision of a tied-up, mutilated bull trying to save itself from the butcher. the trials of post-independence india lead to the 'progressive artist's group' formed by fellow-artist f.n. souza. the group, which drew stylistic inspiration from western modernism, strongly influenced tyeb.


at 34, tyeb left for london, at 43, he was in the us on a rockfeller fellowship and at 59, he was back at shantiniketan as an artist in residence and finally he came back to where he started - mumbai.


many of the protagonists in tyeb’s work—the rickshaw puller, the trussed bull, kali—are rooted in autobiography: a vacation spent with his grandmother in calcutta gave birth to the rickshaw puller. later, he shot footage at a Bandra abbatoir for a tamil documentary 'koodal', the vision of a bull bound and broken on the floor tormented him. one of the most definitive leaps that tyeb made as an artist - diagonal series - the introduction of the diagonal in his paintings—was the result of an accident. in 1969, he thought he had hit a dead end, and in a flounce of frustration, he flung a black streak across his canvas. then, as the drama of the diagonal hit him, he knew he had made a breakthrough, for the slanting gash was the visual equivalent of the biblical verb ‘cleave’ that at once joins and divides. he used the modernist method in a wholly inventive and original manner, which expressed the conflicts in the environment, the political and social events, unhappiness with cultural chaos and conflict between communities. the figures that kept sprouting in his works are the falling human figure, the buffalo-demon of hindu lore, the rickshaw-puller and the goddess kali.



the turning point was in 2002 when a vibrant huge room-size 240 x 515cm triptych which was done during a phase of financial crunch in tyeb's life, but was aptly called 'celebration' sold at christie's for 1.5 crore - first time an indian painting had crossed the crore mark. when tyeb made the painting, he had to take it to a neighbour's house to view it in full. the small stature of his house prevented him from properly analysing the room-size painting.

in 2005, 'mahishasura' a 30 x 24cm acrylic on canvas made in 1997, in which durga grapples with the demon buffalo went for 1.5 million dollars, again the first indian painting to inaugrate the million-dollar mark. but the artist, seldom reaped the profits. when it went through different hands, the sum dwindled to smaller proportions.

poor health always took its toll on him. the sunset years of his life saw him losing his eye-sight to near-blindness, impaired hearing, and a weak heart which had forced him to use a walker. he had become barely audible in his last years. when his body or work started to reap in cash, he was no longer able to work. the tubes of colors in his studio beckoned to him in vain.

the artist who failed to reap in the moolah which was rightly his, the artist who let his work speak for him, the artist who preferred to stay away from the limelights and grandeur, the artist who emoted suddenly to stories of persecution, the padma bhushan recipient breathed his last yesterday, following a fourth heart attack.

most artists are known to produce their best work in their early years. tyeb used his early years as a stepping stone to craft his art, the fifties and sixties acknowledging his talent, the seventies when he would leave behind everything he had achieved so far to develop the firm brushstrokes to indicate the lament and anguish of the disenfranchised, the eighties and nineties resulting in a body of work that was not just his but also the country’s finest — the diagonal series, his rickshaw pullers, the kali and mahishasura series, and the 'celebration' and santiniketan triptychs.

tyeb mehta will be remembered most for the “suppressed energy” and violence of his works, the primordial engagement of negative and positive energies, between what some might consider the mythologies of good and evil, or perhaps two powerful forces.