Page 68 - Pundole's Auction M0015

29 #

PROPERTY FROM THE GLENBARRA ART MUSEUM, JAPAN

TYEB MEHTA

1925?–?2009

Nude

Ink on paper
1960s
30 × 22 in. (76.5 × 56 cm.)

??25,00,000?–?35,00,000

$ 37,315?–?52,240

PROVENANCE:
The collection of the artist S.H. Raza
Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi
Glenbarra Art Museum, Japan

Tyeb Mehta spent the majority of his years as a painter
contemplating the human condition. The solitary human
figure, whether seated, standing or falling, is omnipresent
in his body of work. Of his works, poet Nissim Ezekiel has
said that they ‘…create an ethos of brooding, sombre
consciousness for which there is no equivalent, so far
as I know, in modern Indian painting. These are paintings
that pose unanswered and unanswerable questions
about the human condition… That is their moral authority.’
(Nissim Ezekiel, Tyeb Mehta, exhibition catalogue, Kunika
Chemould Art Center, New Delhi, 1970, unpaginated)

This current work, executed around the time Mehta
moved to London in 1959, reveals his exposure to western
artistic influences; namely the old masters and European
modernists. It is representative of the earliest phase of
Mehta’s engagement with figures. As Ranjit Hoskote
notes, ‘In the earliest years of this first phase of his art,
Tyeb’s protagonists communicated the seismic unease
of fugitives, refugees, survivors, individuals ill at ease in
their ethos, their bodies like squared-up masses held firm
by rope-thick outlines.’ (Ranjit Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas
Images Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 5)

This solitary, largely androgynous figure with an expression
of despair; his body language mirroring this despondent
expression, and a defensive arm running across his torso,
echoes the artist’s experience as a young man during
the brutal partition of India. This experience informs all of
Mehta’s works, inhabited by figures suspended in anguish
and distress, frozen in the moment, like passive victims.

66