DIALOGUE
Celebration Tyeb Mehta In conversation with Ranjit Hoskote Ranjit Hoskote is widely considered to be India’s foremost contemporary art curator and critic. Hoskote is also an art historian and poet.
NOV — DEC 2012
What makes Tyeb Mehta the most coveted
artist for all in the art community, especially
collectors?
Tyeb Mehta’s work conveys the powerful resonance of myth. In his paintings, the image is always produced from palpable struggles of the spirit. Great questions are wrestled with in the space of the canvas or the drawing – questions of the self that always break down into contending halves, of justice and violence, the fate of the weak, and the inevitability of history’s tides. The icon, it always seems in Tyeb’s paintings, is just a step or two away from destruction. It has been wrested away from the dissolution of time, and presented to us in a cocoon of eternity – the trussed bull; the figure in free fall; the goddess locked in a struggle of love and death with the god turned into a bull-demon; the rickshaw-puller who is man and machine conjoined. I would think that many viewers, and certainly collectors, remain fascinated by Tyeb’s breathtaking ability to produce these memorable, haunting
icons. To view his works is to be drawn into their mystery.
‘Celebration’ had unprecedented success at a Christie’s auction in 2002… What makes this particular work special? ‘Celebration’ (1995) is a work distinguished by its grandeur. Tyeb showed himself to be the master, in this triptych, of the polyphony of figures. While many of his iconic images are those of solitaries, ‘Celebration’ gathered all the isolated figures in his repertoire into a choric dance of life, death and renewal. As viewers, we were taken out of ourselves – literally, rendered ecstatic – by this painting, which staked its creator’s claim to belonging to the grand tradition that courses through Poussin, Matisse, and Picasso. In its painterly ambition, its scale, the richness of its conception, ‘Celebration’ is one of Tyeb’s greatest paintings, and communicates this powerfully.
There’s a certain angst in the expressions and movements of the figures in ‘Celebration'. Can you explain this?
As the scholar Heinrich Zimmer points out, the classical Indic ideal of celebration is a “grave festivity,” a celebration in which the joy of
life is mixed with the awareness of death and dissolution, and also with the hope of rebirth. Samsara and Nirvana, Kama and Moksha, Iha and Para – Indic philosophy has always theorised our term on earth through the dynamic interplay of opposites: life and release, desire and liberation from desire, the material and the transcendental. Tyeb was deeply immersed in this form of thinking, and ‘Celebration’ draws its rich tonal complexity, its shading of ambivalences and paradoxes, from this world-view.
Do you think Tyeb’s life and personality is
reflected in the imagery and treatment of
his works…?
Greatly so. ‘Celebration’ may be seen as a summation of the tragic wisdom, hard-won joy, appreciation of the mixed beauty and terror, and the ever-shifting balance of solitude and sociality – all of which were lessons Tyeb drew from his experience. Like the self in the Upanishadic parable, presented as two birds – one eats a fruit, the other watches it eat – Tyeb’s practice involved the ability to experience deeply, while also reflecting deeply on his own experience, at the same time. ‘Celebration’ is the outcome of this ever-deepened practice of art.