Tyeb Mehta

Biography

In 1969, in a moment of creative frustration, Tyeb Mehta flung a black streak across his canvas. Out of this accident grew the “Diagonal Series”, on which he worked throughout the 1970s.

He was forty-four. The story is hard to verify.

Mehta was born on 26 July 1925 (according to other sources, 25 July) in Kapadvanj, a town in what is now Kheda district, Gujarat. He grew up in Bombay, in the neighbourhood around Crawford Market. In 1947, during the riots that accompanied the partition of British India, the twenty-two-year-old Mehta, then living in Lehri House on Mohammed Ali Road, saw a man stoned to death by a mob. He made a drawing of it, and the scene itself, it is thought, shaped the starkness and disquiet of his images for a long time to come.

For a while he worked as a film editor in the laboratory of Famous Studios in the Tardeo district of Bombay. In 1952 he received his diploma from the Sir J. J. School of Art and joined the circle of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, to which F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza and M. F. Husain belonged and which looked to Western modernism for its models. This first post-colonial generation of Indian artists turned away from the nationalist Bengal school towards Post-Impressionist colour, Cubist forms and a brusque expressionist manner.

In 1959 Mehta left for London and lived there until 1964; his painting of those years is close to the expressionism of Francis Bacon. Then came New York: in 1968 he received a fellowship from the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund, and minimalism entered his work. In the same year, 1968, he won a gold medal for painting at the first Triennale in New Delhi. Mehta also made films: he shot the three-minute “Koodal” (Tamil for “meeting place”) at the Bandra slaughterhouse, and in 1970 it won the Filmfare Critics’ Award. Trussed bulls and the rickshaw puller hauling his cart became recurring motifs of those years. In 1974 he was awarded the Prix National at the International Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. In 1977 Georgina and Ulli Beier published a book about him with the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies.

Another turn came in 1984–1985, when he was artist-in-residence at Santiniketan and returned to Bombay with a markedly changed manner. From this grew the “Santiniketan Triptych”, to which Ramchandra Gandhi devoted a separate book in 2002. The motif of the falling figure, going back to what he saw in 1947, appeared as early as 1965 according to some sources, while others date it to 1991. He reinterpreted Indian mythology in the language of modernism, and his late works feature more and more of its figures: the goddess Kali and the demon Mahishasura, and in one version of the Mahishasura story the goddess Durga is locked with the demon in an embrace. The triptych “Celebration” is also among the best-known works of his later years.

In 1988 he received the Kalidas Samman from the government of Madhya Pradesh, in 2005 the Dayawati Modi Foundation award, and in 2007 the Padma Bhushan. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and at the Hirshhorn Museum, and in 2008 the Vadehra Art Gallery published the book “Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges”, written by him together with Ranjit Hoskote and Roshan Shahani.

Apart from his years in London, New York and Santiniketan, Mehta spent almost his whole life in Bombay, today’s Mumbai. He died there on 2 July 2009 (according to other sources, 1 July). A retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi was being prepared for the end of that year.