Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | March 2008

51 27 Tyeb Mehta (b.1925) Untitled Oil on canvas, 1966 48.0 x 58.0 in (121.9 x 147.3 cm) INR 16,000,000 – 20,000,000 USD 400,000 – 500,000 Illustrated Reference Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges. New Delhi: Vadehra Gallery 2005. Full colour, p77. ‘Tyeb is a figurative painter. His loyalty to the human figure I interpret also as a loyalty to human values, to a recognition of man as being always and forever the centre of the universe. But this is not a facile humanity, composed of accepted token and clichés. I believe Tyeb is an extremely difficult painter to understand. There is no instant attractiveness in his works, like the neon-lighted distinctiveness with which many artists attract customers. There is no seductive appeal of colour or form or content. On the contrary, like a cunning barbed wire entanglements and barricades, beset with mines and booby-traps, and machine gun nests all carefully camouflaged – a region which only the determined and intrepid beholder would dare cross. And having crossed it, somewhat bloodied and exhausted what does he find ? Nothing but the tattered regalia of human vanity; the terrifying, winding labyrinth of eternal symbols of human faith, and human despair and human dignity. There is a desolate beauty in these ravaged works, the bleak beauty of lonely, striken places, haunted by the wind only, lit by a light neither of the day nor of the stars, but of man’s spirit.’ – E.Alkazi 1966, rpt. in Tyeb Mehta Ideas Images Exchanges Vadehra Art Gallery 2004; p371.