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Lot Essay
For me the trussed bull is a compulsive image. [...] It served as a metaphor for the violent struggles one experiences in life [...] the bull is a powerful animal and when its legs are tied and it's thrown down, it is an assault on life itself
- Tyeb Mehta, 1990
Born 100 years ago in 1925, Tyeb Mehta is lauded as one of India’s greatest and most respected modern artists. Although he initially apprenticed as a filmmaker, Mehta turned to painting after befriending members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay. Many of the artists in this circle drew stylistic inspiration from Western Modernism while re-interpreting distinctly Indian themes in their work. In a similar fashion, Mehta studied the work of Indian and international artists, and was deeply influenced by the principles of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism among other artistic currents popular in Europe and America at the time.
Over the course of his six-decade-long career, Mehta experimented with different stylistic devices like flattened and simultaneous perspectives, the juxtaposition of linear and voluminous representations of form, and varying frontal and profiled lines of sight, associated with artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Barnett Newman. One of Mehta’s most significant artistic breakthroughs, however, followed a year-long stay in New York on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1968. The roughly textured brushstrokes that characterized his earlier works were transformed into a new mode, as seen in the present lot, with structured expanses of saturated color, a conscious two-dimensionality focused more on line than contour, and the complete elimination of any sign of the artist’s hand or brush.
As the artist recalled, his “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 colour. 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” (Artist statement, ‘In Conversation with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth’, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 342).
The present lot, painted in 1994 and titled Trussed Bull, marks Mehta’s return to a subject that he first engaged with almost fifty years earlier. As he noted, “I was looking for an image to express this anguish and years later, I found it in the British Museum. I was fascinated by the image of the trussed bull in the Egyptian bas-relief and created my first major painting, The Trussed Bull, in 1956 [...] I admired the plasticity of the bull of the Sarnath pillar. I would go to the Bandra abattoir to study and sketch the animal in my school days” (Artist statement in N. Adajania , ‘Tonalities: A Conversation with Tyeb Mehta’, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 357). The motif of the bull remained at the core of Mehta’s practice throughout his oeuvre, one among the few images that always “haunted him, burning themselves deep into his mental circuitry [...] these obsessional images, autobiographical in import, gradually gained significance as Tyeb externalised them, reflecting on them, and allowed them to shimmer against the wider canvas of society” (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 14).
Starting with his earliest series of ink drawings of bulls, executed in 1955, Yashodhara Dalmia notes that, “The bull mutated and transformed over the years but its simmering force continued to exercise a hold over the image [...] Man and animal interface with each other in the film Koodal made in 1970 and depict the flagellation of life itself. The bull reduced to carcass, the human being transformed into a mask, the folk dancer striking himself for the amusement of the audience were images in the film which brought home forcefully the violence prevalent in day to day living. The bull and the fractured figure were part of the same emotional source and conveyed a strong sense of life nipped in the bud” (Y. Dalmia, ‘Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man’, Tyeb Mehta, Triumph of Vision, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 8-9). Apart from his painting practice and this seminal film, the subject of the bull also shaped Mehta’s various engagements with printmaking and sculpture over the course of his career.
In the present lot, the trussed bull returns as the central protagonist in Mehta’s work, laying on its back with feet splayed, frozen in terror moments before its death. Suspended against a background of viridian, gray and white, it recalls Mehta’s first painting of the bull, which also focused solely on the animal against a background divided into three distinct registers. In both these paintings, the bull is not conflated with any of the other fundamental tropes of the artist’s visual vocabulary like the falling figure, rickshaw or the anthropomorphic Mahishasura. Instead, it lies alone and helpless, representing universal struggle, the unjust appropriation of power and potential, and the artist’s own disillusionment with the modern world.
As Mehta explained, “As the discovery of an image, the trussed bull was important for me on several levels. As a statement of great energy… blocked or tied up. The way they tie up the animals legs and fling it on the floor of the slaughterhouse before butchering it… you feel something very vital has been lost. The trussed bull also seemed representative of the national condition… the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies. Perhaps also my own feeling about my early life in a tightly knit, almost oppressive community” (Artist statement, ‘In Conversation with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth’, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 341).
“In a lifetime's work, viewed as a process, it could be said that Tyeb achieved on the one hand an articulation of pain and struggle and a saga of survival, and at the same time a painterly language which parallels reality with equal resilience. The increasing debilitation of political and civic life around him was witnessed with a restrained economy of line which conveyed both the pain and transcending of it as an interlocked movement of form” (Y. Dalmia, ‘Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man’, Tyeb Mehta, Triumph of Vision, New Delhi, 2011, p. 27).
- Tyeb Mehta, 1990
Born 100 years ago in 1925, Tyeb Mehta is lauded as one of India’s greatest and most respected modern artists. Although he initially apprenticed as a filmmaker, Mehta turned to painting after befriending members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay. Many of the artists in this circle drew stylistic inspiration from Western Modernism while re-interpreting distinctly Indian themes in their work. In a similar fashion, Mehta studied the work of Indian and international artists, and was deeply influenced by the principles of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism among other artistic currents popular in Europe and America at the time.
Over the course of his six-decade-long career, Mehta experimented with different stylistic devices like flattened and simultaneous perspectives, the juxtaposition of linear and voluminous representations of form, and varying frontal and profiled lines of sight, associated with artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Barnett Newman. One of Mehta’s most significant artistic breakthroughs, however, followed a year-long stay in New York on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1968. The roughly textured brushstrokes that characterized his earlier works were transformed into a new mode, as seen in the present lot, with structured expanses of saturated color, a conscious two-dimensionality focused more on line than contour, and the complete elimination of any sign of the artist’s hand or brush.
As the artist recalled, his “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 colour. 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” (Artist statement, ‘In Conversation with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth’, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 342).
The present lot, painted in 1994 and titled Trussed Bull, marks Mehta’s return to a subject that he first engaged with almost fifty years earlier. As he noted, “I was looking for an image to express this anguish and years later, I found it in the British Museum. I was fascinated by the image of the trussed bull in the Egyptian bas-relief and created my first major painting, The Trussed Bull, in 1956 [...] I admired the plasticity of the bull of the Sarnath pillar. I would go to the Bandra abattoir to study and sketch the animal in my school days” (Artist statement in N. Adajania , ‘Tonalities: A Conversation with Tyeb Mehta’, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 357). The motif of the bull remained at the core of Mehta’s practice throughout his oeuvre, one among the few images that always “haunted him, burning themselves deep into his mental circuitry [...] these obsessional images, autobiographical in import, gradually gained significance as Tyeb externalised them, reflecting on them, and allowed them to shimmer against the wider canvas of society” (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 14).
Starting with his earliest series of ink drawings of bulls, executed in 1955, Yashodhara Dalmia notes that, “The bull mutated and transformed over the years but its simmering force continued to exercise a hold over the image [...] Man and animal interface with each other in the film Koodal made in 1970 and depict the flagellation of life itself. The bull reduced to carcass, the human being transformed into a mask, the folk dancer striking himself for the amusement of the audience were images in the film which brought home forcefully the violence prevalent in day to day living. The bull and the fractured figure were part of the same emotional source and conveyed a strong sense of life nipped in the bud” (Y. Dalmia, ‘Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man’, Tyeb Mehta, Triumph of Vision, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 8-9). Apart from his painting practice and this seminal film, the subject of the bull also shaped Mehta’s various engagements with printmaking and sculpture over the course of his career.
In the present lot, the trussed bull returns as the central protagonist in Mehta’s work, laying on its back with feet splayed, frozen in terror moments before its death. Suspended against a background of viridian, gray and white, it recalls Mehta’s first painting of the bull, which also focused solely on the animal against a background divided into three distinct registers. In both these paintings, the bull is not conflated with any of the other fundamental tropes of the artist’s visual vocabulary like the falling figure, rickshaw or the anthropomorphic Mahishasura. Instead, it lies alone and helpless, representing universal struggle, the unjust appropriation of power and potential, and the artist’s own disillusionment with the modern world.
As Mehta explained, “As the discovery of an image, the trussed bull was important for me on several levels. As a statement of great energy… blocked or tied up. The way they tie up the animals legs and fling it on the floor of the slaughterhouse before butchering it… you feel something very vital has been lost. The trussed bull also seemed representative of the national condition… the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies. Perhaps also my own feeling about my early life in a tightly knit, almost oppressive community” (Artist statement, ‘In Conversation with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth’, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images, Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 341).
“In a lifetime's work, viewed as a process, it could be said that Tyeb achieved on the one hand an articulation of pain and struggle and a saga of survival, and at the same time a painterly language which parallels reality with equal resilience. The increasing debilitation of political and civic life around him was witnessed with a restrained economy of line which conveyed both the pain and transcending of it as an interlocked movement of form” (Y. Dalmia, ‘Metamorphosis: From Mammal to Man’, Tyeb Mehta, Triumph of Vision, New Delhi, 2011, p. 27).