Tyeb Mehta

Tyeb Mehta was born in Kapadvanj, Gujarat, in 1925. In 1947, during the Partition riots, he saw a man stoned to death in the street. The memory shaped much of what he painted later: bodies bound, divided, falling.

He worked as a film editor at Famous Studios in Tardeo before taking his diploma from the Sir J J School of Art in 1952. He fell in with the Progressive Artists’ Group and then went to London from 1959 to 1964, where he looked hard at Francis Bacon. A Rockefeller fellowship took him to New York in 1968, and with it an encounter with minimalism.

The diagonal came in 1969. A single line cuts across the canvas and splits the figure in two, and he kept using it through the 1970s. In 1970 his three-minute film Koodal won the Filmfare Critics Award. After a residency at Santiniketan in 1984 and 1985 came the Santiniketan triptych and paintings of Kali and Mahishasura; the Falling Figures followed in 1991.

The bull, the bound figure and the diagonal stayed with him to the end. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2007 and died in Mumbai two years later. Trussed Bull of 1956, one of the first in the series, sold at Saffronart in Mumbai in 2025.