Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee sold for $1,392,500 and $912,500 respectively, at the September sale of the auction house. By Uma Nair
Christie’s sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art totaled $8,314,625 with 81per cent sold by lot and 85 per cent sold by value. The top lot of the sale was a masterpiece by Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009), Diagonal XV, which sold for $1,392,500. Other notable results included Akbar Padamsee’s (B. 1928), Rooftops, which went for $912,500.
Tyeb’s Diagonal belonged to the distinguished author Gurcharan Das. Today, Das has turned his focus to the future through philanthropy. By offering one of the works from his impressive private art collection at this auction, Das hopes to raise funds to realise some important projects in this direction.
TYEB MEHTA: DIAGONAL XV
Critic curator and poet Ranjit Hoskote described Tyeb’s work as, “The diagonal, the fierce weapon by which space could be reorganised and the self could stage its battle with itself was born almost fortuitously, out of painterly frustration. Having come to an impasse in his handling of the relationship between figure, field and colour, in 1969, Tyeb suddenly flung a black slash across one of his paintings: beginning as an improvisatory resolution to a periodically intractable problem, the diagonal became a device to activate the painting, and eventually, a symbol of scission, of that simultaneous separation and twinning by which the self recognises and comes to healing terms with its own contradictions.”
The Christie’s catalogue also has Tyeb’s own words, “I was trying to work out a way to define space…to activate a canvas. If I divided it horizontally and vertically, I merely created a preponderance of smaller squares or rectangles. But if I cut the canvas with a diagonal, I immediately created a certain dislocation. I was able to distribute and divide a figure within the two created triangles and automatically disjoint and fragment it. Yet the diagonal maintained an almost centrifugal unity… in fact became a pictorial element in itself.”
Having had the privilege of seeing several works by Tyeb Mehta over the last 15 years, I am still amazed by the sophistication and potency of Mehta’s quintessential icons — the falling figure, the trussed bull, the rickshaw puller — every time I encounter them. The artist seems to freeze these compelling moments in his large paintings, inviting the viewer to become part of them. For me, his paintings invoke wonder and devastation in equal measure, as he reveals truths that continue to be as relevant and universal today as when he created his paintings,” says Nishad Avari, director and head of sales, South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art New York.
Rooftops
The second highest bidding went to the Sanskrit scholar and voracious reader and thinker Akbar Padamsee, one of the founding members of the Progressives. A monumental landscape from 1959 titled Rooftops, is the first of Padamsee’s scroll-like paintings of his ‘gray period’, significant in its clear illustration of the artist’s transition to a new method of working with paint and a unique way of visualising colour, scale and composition. Speaking about this, he noted, “[...] in order to overcome the practical problem of nearness, I discovered this adventurous, new way of composing a picture. It was not possible to see the entire painting unless I moved far behind. As the angle of our vision is 28°, I would conceal the painting and open it part by part as I went along. It was as if it were unrolling itself in space. As I started composing in this way, I found that I had discovered a very different kind of composition.”
A panoramic composition with no linear narrative or any definite beginning and end, this dense landscape is almost entirely filled by block-like architectural forms, abutting each other on what looks like a gentle hillside. The perspective Padamsee employs seems to shift from frontal to aerial as the composition progresses up the hill, with edifices of various shapes and sizes jostling for space, including domed Mediterranean towers, red-roofed houses and a few pointed turrets. As with all his works, this landscape has no specific geographic or chronological location or any clear residents. Inspired by a fleeting glimpse of Mumbai’s skyline from his friend Bal Chhabda’s window, this carefully orchestrated vista instead suggests the timeless and the infinite. Not only does Rooftops represent a momentous point of departure in Padamsee’s oeuvre, but it is also a critical meditation on color, form and movement — an examination of the very act of painting and one that continues to shape and inform the artist’s work even today.
“It was an absolute honour to be able to handle the sale of Rooftops from 1959, the first of Akbar Padamsee’s limited series of monumental ‘grey paintings’. For me, this painting is a perfect example of the eclectic and non-linear approach to modernism that is embodied in Padamsee’s creative process, which continues to be simultaneously personal and rational, informed by an ever-growing amalgam of experiences, studies and instinct,” adds Avari.