Inspired by the picture of a trussed bull made in Egyptian bas-relief he encountered in 1954 on the British Museum in London — the place he was residing on the time — Tyeb Mehta’s 1956 canvas Trussed Bull has fetched a staggering Rs 61.80 crore, making it the second costliest work of Indian artwork to be bought at an public sale, sharing the place with Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Storyteller that bought for a similar worth in September 2023.
Mehta’s oil portray of the bull, which got here up on the market from his property, commanded the sum in a packed corridor through the twenty fifth Anniversary Dwell Sale of Saffronart in Mumbai on April 2.
The present report for the costliest work of Indian artwork to be auctioned is held by MF Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra) that bought at a Christie’s public sale in New York for Rs 118 crore final month.
Discussing Mehta’s work as one of many highlights of the public sale forward of the sale, Dinesh Vazirani, co-founder and CEO of Saffronart, had acknowledged: “The exceptional sophistication of this portray lies not solely within the efficiency of Tyeb’s imagery but additionally in his capacity to distill his topic to its most important kind. He renders the bull with thick, exact black traces, echoing the fashion of his drawings from the identical interval. The thick impasto color fields spotlight the equal significance he accorded to color, area and construction. This emphasis later developed into flat, fractured planes of color that grew to become a defining function of his fashion from the late Nineteen Sixties onwards.”
Tyeb Mehta (Wikimedia Commons)
The Kapadvanj (Gujarat)-born artist, who graduated from the Sir JJ College of Artwork in Mumbai in 1952, grew to become captivated by the bull determine throughout his scholar years. He steadily noticed these highly effective animals on the Kennedy Bridge in South Bombay and a slaughterhouse within the Bandra suburbs. He was deeply moved by the stark distinction between their uncooked power and the cruelty of their captivity. Explaining the importance of the bull in his artwork in an interview with artwork historian and curator Yashodhara Dalmia (cited within the public sale lot essay), he had acknowledged, “As the invention of a picture, the trussed bull was necessary for me on a number of ranges. As an announcement of nice power… blocked or tied up. The way in which they tie up the animal’s legs and fling it on the ground of the slaughterhouse earlier than butchering it… you are feeling one thing very important has been misplaced.”
Showing in a number of of his works, the imagery of the trussed bull was each a metaphor for humanity’s failure to understand its full potential and an expression of Mehta’s emotions of entrapment by circumstance. It symbolised his need to beat struggling, reflecting his interior turmoil and the haunting reminiscences of the Partition. The traumatic expertise of witnessing a person being slaughtered on the street outdoors his home through the Partition riots, when he was in his early 20s, left an indelible mark on each his thoughts and his work.
A member of the famed Progressive Artists’ Group established in Mumbai in 1947, the artist was additionally a skilled movie editor who lived in London from 1959 to 1964, and visited the US on a Rockefeller Fund Scholarship in 1968. Awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2007 for his contribution to Indian artwork, his works are in distinguished museum collections the world over. This yr additionally marks the beginning centenary of Mehta, who handed away in 2009.
Along with Mehta’s work, the public sale featured a number of different works that bought for costs far exceeding their estimates, making it “the very best worth sale of South Asian artwork ever achieved at an public sale” — recording a determine of Rs 217.81 crore.
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Chatting with The Indian Categorical after the sale of MF Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra), Vazirani stated: “Over the previous few years, the Indian artwork market grew to become very vibrant with each Indian and non-Indian consumers displaying critical curiosity. Artwork is now ingrained in individuals’s minds the place they’re curious, eager on buying the very best and acknowledging worth based mostly on the significance of a portray… Sturdy capital markets, rising incomes, and simpler entry to artwork and data have pushed demand… Notably, that is the primary time a piece by Husain has led the Indian artwork market with a world report, one thing beforehand achieved by artists like S H Raza, Tyeb Mehta, Amrita Sher-Gil and VS Gaitonde. This breakthrough is more likely to affect the costs of those artists too, driving upward motion for key items that maintain each historic significance and significance within the broader context of Indian artwork.”