2025 marks Tyeb Mehta’s birth centenary; his painting, Mahishasura, was the first Indian work of art to cross million dollar mark in 2005; his family remembers the man behind the masterpieces
Costume designer Himani Mehta Dehlvi says that if her father were alive and heard all the discussions about his art being at the top of the Indian art pyramid and fetching prices like they do, he would have had a hearty laugh about it. She is referring to her late father Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009), one of the major modern masters of India, the strength of whose creativity played a pivotal role in the birth of the Indian art market itself.
“He and my mother Sakina went through a lot of hardships to reach where they did but he never painted with commerce in mind. Even after the market picked up and people asked him to raise the price of his art, he remained unaffected and continued to paint in the same disciplined manner as before,” says Dehlvi.
This is a landmark year both for Tyeb Mehta and for the Indian art market. While July 26 marks his centenary, 20 years ago, on September 21, 2005, his work Mahishasura sold for $1.584 million at a Christie’s auction in New York, becoming the first Indian work of art to cross the million dollar mark. That vital sale marked the birth of the Indian art market itself, which has not looked back ever since.
Today, Mehta’s 1956 oil on canvas, titled Trussed Bull, is the second most expensive work of Indian art ever sold, fetching Rs 61.80 crore ($7.2 million) at a Saffronart auction in April this year; it’s an honour that it shares with Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Storyteller, which achieved the same figure at a Saffronart auction in September 2023. (The most expensive Indian work of art is M. F. Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra), that scooped up Rs 118.62 crore at a Christie’s auction in New York in March 2025).
Knowing Tyeb Mehta’s art
Even though Tyeb Mehta’s name is like an undetachable appendix of any conversation on the Indian art market, the business side of art was alien to his personality, as his daughter has already shared.
Yet, his art came to assume great economic significance because it was superlative even in the rarefied field of major Indian modern masters, including the likes of S. H. Raza, M. F. Husain, V. S. Gaitonde, F. N. Souza, Krishen Khanna and Ram Kumar, to name just a few.
Tyeb Mehta’s 1956 oil on canvas, ‘Trussed Bull’, is the second most expensive work of Indian art ever sold.
Born in Kapadvanj in Gujarat, he was brought up in Bombay, where he studied at Sir J. J. School of Art. His daughter informs that Mehta had initially joined Sir J. J. to study art direction in cinema as he hailed from a family that ran cinema houses in Bombay, Poona and Gujarat.
“But after getting acquainted with the arts department of the school, he decided to pursue actual practice of art,” she says, adding, “His first job too was as a film editor’s assistant at Famous Cinelabs in Bombay.” He would go on to make a 17-minute film for the Films Division, titled Koodal, which would win him the Filmfare Critics Award in 1970.
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By the time Mehta graduated from Sir J. J. School of Art in 1952, he was closely associated with the Progressive Artists’ Group, founded in 1947. He was thus a part of the generation of young Indian artists that was seeking to create a new idiom for modern art for their newly independent country. As their careers would testify in the decades to follow, almost all of them individually forged a new path for their art, and for the modern art vocabulary of India.
Mehta’s art was impacted by the epochal political events of the time —initial euphoria of independence tinged with subsequent social and economic deprivation — that would find expression in his Falling Figures series of the 1960s-70s. Intense and laden with pathos, these works were a direct consequence of the trauma that the Partition of the subcontinent unleashed on the common man on the street. These works are characterised by the depiction of the human body mid-air, as if flung in space and tumbling towards some fearful destiny.
This series is important in the development of Mehta’s individuated abstraction — it is characterised by flat colour planes and hints of geometric abstraction which formed the background for bodies in free fall. Its gradual evolution would lead to his next series, for which he is most famous, known as the Diagonal series. It is a more formalised essay in abstraction, where a diagonal is used deliberately to dislocate the protagonist figure and imbue the picture with a certain tension.
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It is widely known that in 1970-71, after extended stays in London and New York, where he had been exposed to Francis Bacon’s distortion, and Abstract Expressionism, respectively, Mehta had returned to Bombay, where he was struggling to place his human figure in the context of modernist, geometrical abstraction.
Tyeb Mehta, Falling Figure With Bird, 2004
One day, deep in frustration, he slashed the blank canvas with black paint and the resultant diagonal running across the plane became his moment of serendipity. In an interview with Ranjit Hoskote, he shared, “The moment I did it, everything fell into place. I had broken the picture surface… The diagonal resolved it for me.”
The device of the diagonal would go on to give birth to several important works of art, that are of significance not just in the repertoire of the artist but of modern Indian art as well. Mahishasura and Kali, two of the very well-known works by Mehta, belong to this series. The diagonal gave a new visual metaphor through which the artist was able to resolve contemporary political and social issues by using it to depict trauma, rupture and division. It would immediately divide the canvas unconventionally, into two different realities, and the figure trapped in and around the diagonal would become a symbol for human suffering.
Using figures from mythology
By using the diagonal and the symbolism of figures from Indian mythology, Mehta succeeded in creating politically charged works that addressed the pressing issues of the time that provoked the viewer to think without hurting any sentiments.
Ashok Vajpeyi, poet, former bureaucrat and trustee of the Raza Foundation, says, “One of the deeply Indian feature of modern Indian art has been its plurality of aesthetic visions, styles and art practice. Tyeb developed his own very distinct idiom. His art explores two major themes — the Partition and fall. Also, the cruel, the grotesque, the relentless violence in human affairs. In him, the classical, the folk and the modern are together creating a rare artistic alchemy. To me, he is possibly the most political amongst the galaxy of modern masters.”
Anand Madia of the UAE based Bharata Bhava Foundation (the only foundation in the UAE dedicated to preserving and promoting Indian art), who has collected Tyeb Mehta over the years, says, “Tyeb Mehta’s place in the trajectory of modern Indian art is seminal because he eschewed traditional motifs even while dealing with traditional stories, as evidenced most famously in the canvas, Mahishasura. After exposure to western modernism, he created a new language of modernism too, which again was not a copy of the west but his own unique distillation of its tenets. In doing so, he revolutionised the very thought process of modern Indian art.”
It is not a surprise then, that the themes of his canvases resonate with those Indian collectors who want to hear the stories that they are familiar with but in a new visual idiom — a hallmark of the global Indian who is rooted and global at the same time.
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Mehta passed away in 2009, in just about a decade since his works such as Celebration, Kali, and then, Mahishasura, had begun to appreciate in prices in the international auction market. He would have been glad to know that as his centenary approaches, his legacy lives on, not just in the way his fame spreads far and wide, but also through profound programming that his eponymous foundation is in the process of running.
The centenary
To mark Mehta’s centenary, the Tyeb Mehta Foundation — helmed by Sakina Mehta (the late artist’s wife), Himani Mehta Dehlvi and her husband Vaseem Ahmed Dehlvi, and the artist’s son and daughter-in-law, Yusuf and Fatima Mehta — are launching two scholarships for students of his alma mater, Sir J. J. School of Art, one each for a student of undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Besides, it is hosting the annual lecture on July 26, titled ‘Conversations with Chai’, in collaboration with Saffronart, which will be delivered by Ranjit Hoskote. “My father loved chai. Lots of chai was made in our house as his friends from the cultural fraternity would visit him. Our house used to be full of open conversations,” recalls Dehlvi.
Most importantly, a limited edition portfolio of 13 prints of works by Mehta would be released to mark the occasion, which has never been done before. These have been selected by the artist’s wife.
In the coming years, the foundation hopes to institute some grants and introduce programming with the idea to make his art understandable to younger generations of artists and connoisseurs. That would be an important step as Mehta’s art marks a landmark in the journey of modern Indian art and its understanding would propel younger generations to forge their own, revolutionary paths to enrich the country’s cultural repertoire.
