The last stroke
KANKANA BASU
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Renowned artist Tyeb Mehta was responsible for the boom in contemporary Indian art, but his death last week leaves a vacuum in the art world.
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"I paint of my times but I’m not of this time." This famous line from Tyeb probably best captures the essence of the artist and his work.
Photos: Osian’s Library and Archive Collection and Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
Haunting work: The famous “Falling Figure”, 1968, Oil on canvas.
The art world suffered an irreplaceable loss with the death of maestro Tyeb Mehta. The 84-year-old artist breathed his last in a Mumbai hospital leaving behind a lacuna that no amount of brush work can ever fill.
A small-town boy from Kapadwanj, Gujarat, who started as a film editor and then went on to join Sir JJ School of Art, Tyeb Mehta was hardly expected to make history by his family. But history he did make and of a spectacular sort when his paintings placed contemporary Indian art firmly in the global limelight and debunked the belief that all Indian art was only about the exotic and the traditional.
While “Kali” broke the Rs. 1 crore barrier, Tyeb’s triptych “Celebration” triggered the biggest Indian art boom seen in the last 50 years by going under the hammer for Rs. 1.5 crores at Christie’s (said to be the highest sum for any Indian work of art). “Falling Figure with Bird”, “Mahishasura” and “Gesture” went for millions of dollars each, establishing Tyeb as one of the most saleable contemporary Indian artists.
Reclusive and reticent
But even at the zenith of international fame and acclaim, the painter remained reclusive, reticent and unencumbered by the baggage that comes with success. Though he had a shot at movie making —“Koodal” (which won him a Filmfare award) — solitude, introspection and deep reflections on a rapidly changing world kept Tyeb Mehta preoccupied in his later years. Tyeb’s paintings — with their clean lines in black or rust, solid planes of vibrant colour splitting the background and figures where men, beasts and birds seemed to collide, fuse and tumble — will continue to haunt art lovers.
“Tyeb was opposed to any kind of social commentary, either overt or covert, and always insisted on the ‘autonomy’ of artistic practice from ideological concerns,” says poet Ranjit Hoskote. The theme of blood, violence and latent aggression seem to recur with disturbing frequency in the artist’s work indicating deep trauma and psychological scars. “Tyeb was very sensitive to violence of any kind. The pre-Partition riots and images of people beaten and hacked to death haunted his subconscious and found their way into his work, which resonated with the threads of sacred violence, warfare in the name of religion and ethnicity, the Partition and the scission of self and community,” says Hoskote, explaining the complex working of the artist’s mind.
Memories of a Calcutta rickshaw puller seen during a childhood vacation and the vision of a bound bull straining to be free (during the shooting of his film) worked themselves into his paintings. The diagonal remains one of the most distinctive features of Tyeb’s works and fellow artists never tire of relating the incident where the artist (suffering from a creative block) flung his brush at the canvas in anger and accidentally created the most famous gash in the history of Indian art. “Thank god for the accident that created the famous ‘cleave’— the eternal line form that both joins and divides,” says actor and painter Deepti Naval who confesses to being hugely influenced by the artist.
Indelible impact
Tyeb’s work was destined to leave an indelible impact not only on lovers of art but also on men and women of words. “When I stand before a painting, I am hit by the leap of colour, by the vivid vital violence,” says poet and author Sampurna Chattarji. “The careful attention to curve, colour, contour, light and shade and the possibility of breathing so much life into the inanimate by mere strokes of a painter’s brush is very similar to the act of writing.”
Multi-crore deals often don’t reach the artists. Tyeb Mehta spent his last years in a modest apartment in Andheri, in which one room was converted into a studio. His eyesight was failing, ill health dogged him and his precious paintings stood with their faces to the walls while all around rose the heat, dust and noise of suburban Mumbai. Though cocooned in his beloved studio, the artist remained deeply connected with the flow of life around him. “I paint of my times but I’m not of this time.” This famous line probably captures the essence of the artist and his work best.
“My first meeting with Tyeb in 1993 was a rare mismatch of energy levels. His humility shone through along with the hoarse voice, the fresh humour and the goodness. He wanted to get rid of the sculpted line in his art but being a figurative painter, was unable to do so. He genuinely loved Husain and was one of the few artists who stood by him,” says Neville Tuli of Osian’s Connoisseurs Art. Though much is said and written about the amazing strings of zeroes attached to his works, Neville prefers to remember Tyeb Mehta the man more than Tyeb the artist. “He was true artist in the golden sense that, for Tyeb, the inner voice dictated all,” says Neville.
A frequent visitor to the artist’s abode, Neville had the privilege of watching the artist as a family man. “I remember Tyeb keeping the early trussed bull for Sakina (his wife) and his children. Their togetherness — he in his usual chair, she sitting silently on the sofa, both of them totally absorbed in each other…” Neville tapers off sadly. Like so many others, he pauses to ponder sadly on the blank waiting canvases that will never know Tyeb’s brush strokes, an empty studio in downtown Bombay and a tender love story that has gone suddenly silent.
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