Tyeb Mehta : Legacy Extraordinaire

Shabari Choudhury

His was a quiet revolution. At a time when the ‘progressives’ of India’s art world were clamouring to claim a language of their own, the contained, silent voice of Tyeb Mehta splintered the canvas of modern Indian art, much like the diagonals in his paintings. Born in Kapadvanj, Gujarat in 1925, into a family whose business was making films, Tyeb Mehta worked as an editor for three years prior to enrolling at the Sir J. J School of Art in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1947. Art came to him by chance when he enrolled at the art school with hopes of becoming an art director. Studying along with contemporaries like Francis Newton Souza, the founding member of the Progressive Group of artists (popularly known as PAG) and Maqbool Fida Hussain, Tyeb Mehta was drawn into a whole new world of colour, form and line. The members of the Progressive Group of artists were the first postcolonial generation of artists in India who actively sought to move away from the western academic
model of classicism that was being taught at art colleges as well as the revivalist wave that had appeared with the freedom movement in the country. As a second generation member of the group, any mention of PAG is usually not without the mention of Tyeb Mehta; especially with context to the presence of Modern Indian Masters in the global art Scenario.