Tyeb Mehta: The Pure Artist
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.
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Image: Chemould Prescott Road
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Kali III, 1989, 150 x 100cms, oil on canvas | |
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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.
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| Image: Chemould Prescott Road |
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Untitled (Figures with Bull Head), 1984, 150 x 106cms, oil on canvas
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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)
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