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Lot Essay
While Tyeb Mehta's pre-1970's works owe a stylistic debt to Francis Bacon, Mehta underwent several epiphanies following his year-long stay in New York in 1968 as a recipient of a Rockefeller Grant. This in turn transformed Mehta's harshly textured expressionist imagery into a new painting mode with structured expanses of color and a conscious two-dimensionality focused more on line than contour.
"My encounter with minimalist art was a revelation. I had seen minimalist reproductions previously but I hadn't seen the works in the original. Had I not seen the original, I might have dismissed many of them as gimmicks just another tricky idea. But when I saw my first original [Barnett Newman] for example, I had such an incredible emotional response to it. The canvas had no image but the way the paint had been applied, the way the scale had been worked out the whole area proportioned. There was something about it which is inexpressible. Let's say there must have been a point of saturation in my work before I went to New York, which my confrontation with the contemporary art scene brought to the surface. I was open to new ideas. About the same time, I became interested in using pure color. Normally brush marks suggest areas of directions. I wanted to avoid all this to bring elements down to such a minimal level that the image alone would be sufficient to speak for itself."
Interview by Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, R. Hoskote, ed., New Delhi, 2005, p. 342.
Blue Torso is an example of the transitional phase between Tyeb Mehta's early and more recent work in terms of style and media. In comparing to a 1997 work, Mahisasura, Mehta's rigor and consistency is evident as he evolves into ever more complex compositions.
"My encounter with minimalist art was a revelation. I had seen minimalist reproductions previously but I hadn't seen the works in the original. Had I not seen the original, I might have dismissed many of them as gimmicks just another tricky idea. But when I saw my first original [Barnett Newman] for example, I had such an incredible emotional response to it. The canvas had no image but the way the paint had been applied, the way the scale had been worked out the whole area proportioned. There was something about it which is inexpressible. Let's say there must have been a point of saturation in my work before I went to New York, which my confrontation with the contemporary art scene brought to the surface. I was open to new ideas. About the same time, I became interested in using pure color. Normally brush marks suggest areas of directions. I wanted to avoid all this to bring elements down to such a minimal level that the image alone would be sufficient to speak for itself."
Interview by Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, R. Hoskote, ed., New Delhi, 2005, p. 342.
Blue Torso is an example of the transitional phase between Tyeb Mehta's early and more recent work in terms of style and media. In comparing to a 1997 work, Mahisasura, Mehta's rigor and consistency is evident as he evolves into ever more complex compositions.