Tyeb Mehta: The Pure Artist

I first met Tyeb Mehta when I was 19 and had just begun to write art criticism. Tyeb’s resplendent images, his falling figures, trussed bulls, shamanic women, and rickshaw-pullers fused with their soul-destroying vehicles, had already won critical acclaim; but had only just begun to be matched by commercial success.Besides, the critical acclaim had come couched in the colonised idiom then still current: To many, Tyeb was the ‘Indian Bacon’, a condescending label, given the palpable difference between the two masters.

Bacon’s screaming popes and twisted models are painted in their human fallibility, ruthlessly rendered as though in the body’s effluents, in spittle, sweat and semen. By contrast, Tyeb’s figures are painted in radiance, in luminous, smoothly brushed colour that transforms the death-marked bull into a symbol of resistance, the plunging body into a creature redeemed from gravity.

Tyeb cloaked, in dignified silence, any bitterness he may have felt at this faint praise and tardy acceptance. By the late 1980s, he had already embarked on the series of encounters with the surgeon’s knife that would constitute his medical history for the rest of his life. These experiences did nothing to blunt the edge of his imagination, which grew more intensely probing in its exploration of the epic turbulences of postcolonial South Asia. His images became more refined and icon-like, but reverberated deeply with the intimations of violence and renewal that came into his studio from the streets and hinterlands beyond: The all-devouring Kali, the frenzied drummer, the goddess battling the buffalo demon.

I enjoyed the privilege of Tyeb’s friendship, meeting him at irregular intervals over two decades; but not often enough, I now think. I admired not only his paintings, but also his sculptures and drawings (neither of which bodies of work have been properly seen by the public), and the magnificent Koodal, the only film that he, who had grown up around the cinema and hoped to become a filmmaker, ever made.

Tyeb was a conversationalist and promoter of conversations, listening far more than he spoke, generous in his reception of fresh thoughts. This surprised people who were overawed by his reputation for being exacting in his intellectual and ethical standards. His friends came from the many domains of creative expression that fascinated him: Among them, his fellow painters M.F. Husain and Bal Chhabda, the poet Prabodh Parikh, the philosopher Ramachandra Gandhi, the architect Sen Kapadia, the theatre director Naushil Mehta.

Our meetings fell into a regular pattern during the two years when we worked closely on a book on his life and art, published in 2005 as Ideas Images Exchanges. The title enshrines the process of art-making, as Tyeb practised it: First, conceptions swirling up in the consciousness; then, images springing from these ideas, drafted and re-drafted, painted and re-painted, tuned up until they were just right; and finally, animated conversations among the circle of friends who were the first to see the completed paintings in Tyeb’s studio.

My wife, Nancy Adajania, was preparing an extensive interview with Tyeb about his preoccupation with cinema and theatre, and I was writing a monographic essay offering a new interpretation of his art and its cultural and political contexts. We would spend long afternoons with Tyeb and Sakina, his wife, companion, confidante and lifelong protector. And while he rarely wanted to discuss his art, Tyeb was eager to share it. After a round of tea or a couple of beers, he would signal to us to follow him into the spare bedroom that served him as a studio in his apartment in suburban Mumbai’s Lokhandwalla Complex: “Come, let me show you what I’ve been doing!”

In the last two years, this had become an anxiety-fraught experience. Tyeb’s eyesight was failing. When he started making a line in charcoal on his canvas, he told us, it would disappear beneath his fingers. And yet, he would spend several agonising months to produce an amazingly magisterial, meticulously rendered image: A falling bird or a human spirit wrenched out of an animal body. Whether in his decision to renounce the options offered by the Bohra business community of his birth or in his battle against a heart pumping at one-fourth its capacity, Tyeb embraced adversity with quiet courage, never once descending into self-pity.

Cultural reporters have asked what legacy Tyeb leaves behind. His images will endure among the finest achievements of Indian art, but his true legacy lies in his life choices. Despite the high auction prices some of his paintings have fetched in recent years, Tyeb’s art embodied the enduring difference between price and value. He lived out the ideal of the pure artist. He never used his art as an instrument of social advancement and short-term profit, dedicating himself instead to the unforgiving logic of the quest for perfection.

(Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural critic and independent curator. He is the author of Tyeb Mehta, Images of Transcendence, due out in 2010)

Reflections
"Tyeb Mehta was a very close friend of mine. Seeing his work since he first exhibited in the last 1950’s, I always thought he was the finest painter of his generation.

When Mehta lived on Mohammed Ali Road in South Mumbai, he watched a man being hacked and slaughtered by rioting people from his window. According to Mehta himself, the uncertainty of freedom, the uncertainty of communal relations, and everything about India that he was concerned with, is all rooted in this one violent image that he actually saw in real life.

He was very much a questing man. And one thing he really wanted to do was make films, and he often talked about it with his dear friend M.F. Husain. Husain made big budget movies. But Mehta didn’t have the money and no one would fund the kind of films he wanted to make.

Mr. Mehta’s specialty is that he dug into Hindu mythology much deeper than any Hindu artist of our time, even Husain. Once he started dealing with a theme, he would exhaust it from every angle, so he wasn’t prolific. But he worked continuously. Even when he died, he had a very large work on his easel. It was only in outline because his eyesight was failing, so his grandson who was a painter was to fill in the outline later. "
Dilip Chitre, Indian painter, writer and filmmaker, and a close friend of Mehta’s


"I guess my immediate feeling, when I saw the announcement of Tyeb's death was ‘Ah, the old guard—and also the vanguard—is dying out.’ I cannot hear his name without immediately thinking of Raza, Souza, Ara, Husain and Akbar Padamsee…they have practically passed into the mythic past. They were the young bloods of Independent India. There was something heady and unbridled about their work, even though it was so inextricably linked to Western modernism.

When I stop to look at it, Mehta’s vision was uniquely his, separate and distinct. And he remained true it, he didn't sway with every passing breeze. He belonged to an era when artists were still expected to be able to draw and I admire that.

There's no clear answer about why he didn't enjoy commercial success—but I would like to think it's because he maintained his purity—he didn't bow his head to Mammon— and maybe that meant that his work took a long slow time to reach the eminence that he achieved later.

What I like about his work is that quality of resistance to pressure—the stolid, uncompromising lines, the block-like solidity of his images. In their homeliness, their lack of ornament and their awkwardness, they come through as sincere."
Manjula Padhmanaban, writer and artist

"Tyeb traversed a long and painful life in many ways. His chosen imagery — usually a solitary figure — became iconic, from the early trussed bulls to the rickshawala and falling figure to Kali and Mahisasaura.

My first meeting with him in 1993 was a rare mismatch of energy levels, as his humility shone through that hoarse voice rooted in a gently absorbed pain. He wanted to get rid of the sculpted line in his art, but being a figurative painter could not; he genuinely loved Husain, and was one of the few artists who always stood by him. I remember how much more passionate and excited he became for me to see his documentary film ‘Koodal’ than his paintings.

Bit by bit his bodily parts were becoming fragile as with many with age, and when rarely we would speak on the phone, it was equally sad and funny, as both of us, neither with the best of health, but both stubborn to the core, shouting into deaf ears with broken voices.

He just wanted his small family to be happy, and I remember how he had kept the early trussed bull for Sakina and his children. That was a rare love and bond, Tyeb and Sakina. Their togetherness, him in his comfy old chair, phone besides, she sitting besides on the sofa, silent but totally absorbed in their togetherness."
Neville Tuli, Chairman of Osian’s

"Whenever we did meet him, we would all flock towards like he was a deity. From his generation people were arrogant and wouldn’t talk to anyone. But he would try and speak to everybody, there was no arrogance about him at all."
Brinda Miller, Contemporary artist