Tyeb Mehta  (Indian, 1925-2009) 

Tyeb Mehta (Indian, 1925–2009) was one of the most distinguished Indian Modernist painters, renowned for his abstracted and political images of contemporary Indian life. Born in Gujurat, in western India, Mehta grew up in a Shiite community in Mumbai; several members of his family worked in film, and Mehta grew up working with films, later establishing himself as a celebrated filmmaker in addition to painting. He attended the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai as a young man, studied European modernist artists; during his time in school, India and Pakistan asserted their political independence and enforced a partition between the two countries, based on separating those of Hindu and Muslim faiths. Mehta witness some of the violence that ensued because of the partition, which affected him for the rest of his life. As a member of a new generation of post-colonialist artists in India and part of the Progressive Artists Group, he combined abstracted, expressionistic aesthetics, influenced by the work of Francis Bacon, with turbulent images of falling bodies, bulls, and religious motifs, evoking the political strife in the region. Mehta later spent several years in London and the United States on a Rockefeller Fellowship, before returning to India. He continued to paint, creating works with flat, fused forms in later years, but India was largely missing the extended network needed to market an artist’s work at that time. His work later gained widespread international attention, and Mehta became one of the best-selling Indian artists, though he was known for maintaining a simple and independent life in Mumbai despite his critical success. He has been honored with the Prix Nationale from the International Festival of Painting, as well as a medal from the First Triennial in New Delhi, the Dayawati Modi Foundation Award for Art, Culture and Education, and a Filmfare Critics Award for one of his films. Mehta died in Mumbai in 2009, at 84 years old; upon his death, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it “a major loss for the art world.”