Indian Artist Enjoys His World Audience
After decades of struggle, Tyeb Mehta, in Mumbai, saw one of his paintings break records for a contemporary Indian work, at Christie's. More Photos >
Correction Appended
MUMBAI - The man who makes the most coveted art in India lives in a small fourth-floor walk-up apartment in a crowded, unremarkable suburb. A sign in the hallway warns of an irregular water supply; the bustle of striving metropolitan India seeps in through his shuttered windows, making it even harder for the artist, 80 and hard of hearing, to entertain a visitor. The only luxury item in his living room is a snowy white iPod, resting on a set of speakers, unless you include a 1959 portrait of his wife, drawn in Chinese ink, that hangs above their dining table, and his 2003 painting "Falling Bird."
Tyeb Mehta's paintings fetch the highest prices of any living Indian artist: last fall, "Mahisasura," a 1997 rendering of the buffalo-demon of Hindu mythology, brought $1.58 million at Christie's in New York, the first time a contemporary Indian painting had crossed the million-dollar mark. (The turning point came five years ago, when a room-size triptych by Mr. Mehta, "Celebration," sold for more than $300,000, signaling a surge of market interest in Indian art.)
Mr. Mehta's career has mirrored the changing fortunes of contemporary Indian art over the last six decades, from the intellectual fervor of its birth at Indian independence in 1947, to a lifetime of aesthetic and financial struggle, to the improbable rise of the Indian art market in the last few years. As the Indian economy has galloped forward, art galleries have mushroomed, prices have skyrocketed and contemporary art has become the latest marker of affluence among the newly minted rich.
Mr. Mehta seems to have taken it all in with a sense of amused detachment. He calls the surge in art prices "meaningless." Still, the recognition pleases him.
"Good it happens in our lifetime," he said. "I'm 80 years old. I could be bumped off anytime by the Almighty. If somebody has some money, they can buy. Let them buy."
Yet Mr. Mehta has, in fact, reaped little financial reward from the art boom. His work has ballooned in price, but the pieces have changed hands several times since he made them, so the sales are in the secondary market. He could churn out drawings and paintings now to profit from the bull market, but he hasn't. Mr. Mehta has never been terribly prolific, and he produces very little today. Art critics rank him among India's least commercial artists. Vincent van Gogh, he is fond of pointing out, died hungry.
Tyeb Mehta was born in 1925 in rural Gujarat, in western India, and was reared in the Crawford Market neighborhood of Mumbai, also known as Bombay, in an orthodox Shiite community known as the Dawoodi Bohras. His family was in the movie business, and he too worked in that world for a few years. But he soon left the family trade, joined the Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art here and met the seminal circle of Indian modernists, the Progressive Artists Group.
Not long after that, he left the family fold altogether. Mr. Mehta recalls it this way: One night, after what was probably an insignificant argument with a member of the extended family, he and his wife, Sakina, walked out of the house. He now calls it the turning point in his life. He was 29.
"There was no exposure to the outside world," he said, describing the insularity of that milieu. "You break the rules, you're out. That's the demand of a community. I chose to leave."
Mr. Mehta is a frail, cheerful man, with graying hair that nearly reaches his shoulders. One must strain to hear him - his voice is nearly gone. He speaks with a studied, quiet seriousness.
The central passion of his work stems from his country's central wound: the 1947 partition of British India that left a million people dead, drove millions from their homes and inscribed a deep sense of anguish across his imagination. In the Hindu-Muslim clashes that broke out around 1947, Mr. Mehta watched as his neighbors butchered a stranger to death. The victim was Hindu and the attackers were Muslim, but it happened the other way around in other neighborhoods. Many Indians his age have an identical memory.
"That violence gave me the clue about the emotion I want to paint," he explained. "That violence has stuck into my mind."
The bull became a favorite figure. Not a bull in repose, but a tied-up, writhing, mutilated bull. "I was looking for an image which would not narrate, but suggest something which was deep within me, the violence that I witnessed during partition," Mr. Mehta said. "Have you seen a bull running? This tremendous energy being butchered for nothing."
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