Tyeb Mehta – A passionate artist with incomparable and intense thoughts By Prabuddha Ghosh

Tyeb Mehta – A passionate artist with incomparable intense thoughts

By Prabuddha Ghosh

Born in Kapadwanj, Gujarat on 26th July 1925, Tyeb Mehta has become one of the most famous Indian artists of his generation. His family had strong business ties to popular Indian cinema, and therefore considered a film career for him after his graduation. Having given up on the first film, which Taib still says was "the first time I was obsessed", he joined the company in 1947 and graduated in 1952.

Over the years, Tyeb was very reluctant to talk about his job. Tyeb's work reflects the underlying violence that was part of his childhood. He remembered seeing a young man killed on the street under a window. A few days after seeing it, he fell ill with a fever, and the image haunted him until the last days of his life.

All manner of violence, even screaming. "Broken forms entered Tyeb's work, flesh severely mutilated, mutilated and skinned. Another theme Tyeb incorporated into his work for nearly three decades was the crucified bull.”

His early work is raw and intense, but some of it seems like a dream to me. Explaining this phenomenon, they explained: “I feel when things suddenly happen and I look into someone’s face. For example, when I was in Kolkata a woman in a rickshaw was beaten up and I saw a man pulling a rickshaw instead. The level of poverty was such that the animal man himself had to pull the rickshaw and the wealthy woman had to sit in the back, but in reality the reasons and practices were different and this still happens. The worst things that can't happen outside happen only in dreams. And in a dream it's a nightmare. These images never let him go, nor did he forget the pain.

When I look at Tyeb Mehta's painting work as a whole, my attention is drawn to his Kali and Mahishsura series, where beauty fights against the grotesque (ridiculous), decontextualizing and re-contextualizing familiar figures from Hindu mythology, resulting in masterpieces that reach the level of Francisco Goya's Saturn eats one of his children.

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