In 2002, the famously reclusive artist Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009) enjoyed a resurgence in the public eye after one of his paintings, a triptych titled Celebration (1995), fetched a staggering $317,500 at Christie’s, the highest ever amount paid for a work by an Indian artist in an international auction. While the sale may have returned Mehta to the limelight, his richly variegated legacy received the attention due to it at a magisterial show curated by Roobina Karode in 2025 to commemorate his centenary at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi.
The exhibition now finds a second life as a book, with essays by Karode, the late Gieve Patel, Ashok Vajpeyi, Aditi Ghildiyal, and Srinivas Mopidevi, along with nearly 200 images of paintings, cinematic stills, and private photographs of the artist, his family and friends. Although he was part of the Progressive Artists’ Group, founded in Bombay (now Mumbai), in 1947, Mehta was unique in his approach to figuration. A witness to the horrors of Partition, he was, to quote Vajpeyi, “the most political painter of his time,” though not because he built grand narratives in his work.
On the contrary, Mehta leached out the trappings of context from his canvas by depicting his tortured figures, human and animal, against empty backdrops. He forced the viewer to train their gaze on the facial and bodily contortions of the people, deities, bulls and birds he kept returning to, most of them captured in media res—in the middle of things—experiencing a moment of pause before being executed, their bodies shattering into sinews and bones, on a rampage to destroy evil, or simply plunging into free fall. The dynamism of his work, as several essayists in the book point out, owed much to his early interest in filmmaking, which his family pursued as a business.
Just as he infused motion into the stillness of the canvas or into his sculptures, he brought an immersive quality to Koodal, the only film he made, in 1970. Even though it stands as an outlier in his mostly painterly repertoire, Koodal was, as the artist told curator Nancy Adajania in an interview, “conceived as a ritual.” The movie is, he added, “about resistance and friction, about life and death, about reconciliation. In a way, it is my autobiography.”
Mehta insinuated such personal symbology into his entire body of work. A singular motif of his style for several decades was the diagonal line, mentioned by all the writers in the book. Its import is most accurately captured in the untranslatable Hindi word teeryak, invoked by Vajpeyi. Like M.F. Husain’s agile horses and S.H. Raza’s vibrant bindu (point), Mehta’s sharp and skewering brushstroke became a metaphorical wound for violence slashing through the canvas, like the arbitrary line that had torn through the fabric of the Indian subcontinent, resulting in a horrendous episode of mayhem and bloodshed during Partition.
More subtly political was Mehta’s gesture of painting his falling figures as well as the beasts of burden, the bulls and the rickshaw-pullers he studied closely, all condemned to a life of relentless labour without dignity. While these characters seem to have emerged out of myths and lore, Mehta drew from the wellspring of the life that surrounded him to depict them with exactitude.
Karode reminds the reader that the artist paid periodic visits to the abattoir in Bandra, Mumbai, to study the animals on the verge of death. He was keenly influenced by the decomposing figures by British artist Francis Bacon that he saw while living in London. Mehta also spent time at the morgue, observing the nuances of dead bodies in various states of decay and disfigurement. Yet, when it came to depicting these vignettes on canvas, he brought a deeply personal vision of tragedy, along with a melancholy regard for the human condition, into his work.
Ultimately, it is Mehta’s ability to access the civilisational horrors that remain buried inside every society that made him the great and enduring artist he is. Looking at his work nearly three decades after his death, the viewer glimpses not only the historical injustices that he mourned and memorialised, but also the intimately familiar nightmares of the time they themselves live in.