“It’s an image which is very near to my mental make-up. The bull is a powerful animal and when its legs are tied and it’s thrown down, it is an assault in itself.” - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta was attuned to the low hum of violence present in a society undergoing massive socioeconomic changes from an early age. Later, as a young man, he was deeply moved by the brutality that attended the Partition of India. In describing an incident he... “It’s an image which is very near to my mental make-up. The bull is a powerful animal and when its legs are tied and it’s thrown down, it is an assault in itself.” - TYEB MEHTA

Tyeb Mehta was attuned to the low hum of violence present in a society undergoing massive socioeconomic changes from an early age. Later, as a young man, he was deeply moved by the brutality that attended the Partition of India. In describing an incident he witnessed from his home in Bombay in the lead up to the Partition he said, “I remember watching a young man being slaughtered in the street below my window. The crowd beat him to death, smashed his head with stones. I was sick with fever for days afterwards and the image still haunts me today.” (The artist in “In Conversation with Nikki Ty-Tomkins Seth”, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 341)

Mehta’s consternation regarding this unprecedented mass social upheaval found expression in the image of the bull. The idea came to him in the form of an Egyptian bas relief he encountered during his stay in London in 1954. He recounted, “I was looking for an image to express this anguish and, years later, I found it in the British Museum. I was fascinated by the image of the trussed bull in the Egyptian bas-relief and created my first major painting, The Trussed Bull, in 1956.” (The artist in Nancy Adajania, “Tonalities: A Conversation with Tyeb Mehta”, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 357)

His association with the animal was developed over a period of time preceding his London sojourn. While still at school, Mehta followed cattle to their ultimate fate in the abattoirs at Kennedy Bridge in South Bombay and, later, at Bandra to observe and sketch the restrained animals as a habit. The sheer vitality of the bull’s frame was compelling; he felt its loss when it was tied up and thrown down on the floor to be slaughtered. Mehta summed up his impulse to include the bull in his consciously finite repertoire of images with, “I felt that if I showed a bull about to be slaughtered, a trussed bull, it would express the fact of man’s immense potential held captive. A bull running is raw energy and here it was trussed up for slaughter.” (The artist in conversation with Yashodhara Dalmia, Journeys: Four Generations of Indian Artists in Their Own Words Volume I, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 88)

The present lot is one of the earliest major trussed bull paintings Mehta made on his return from London in 1954. It was exhibited as part of his first ever solo show in Bombay in 1959, organised by Bal Chhabda for Gallery 59. The artist displays the bull’s majestic form contorted in capitulation to its captor’s rope against a wash of blue. Following the logic of the rope, he binds the beast into a limited space with thick lines. The strength of his line here was honed through his early drawings of bulls. Critic Ranjit Hoskote asserts they highlight the “sweeping, confident strokes; an occasional woodcut-like harshness, the graceful yet vigorous dance of lines of changing thickness” that form the foundation of his paintings. (Ranjit Hoskote, “Images of Transcendence: Towards a New Reading of Tyeb Mehta’s Art”, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas Images Exchanges, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005, p. 12) The artist uses flat colour fields to splice the body into clear sections that anticipate the critically acclaimed two-dimensional multiplanar style he would develop later in his career.

Tyeb Mehta continued to be fascinated by the possibilities presented by the bull, revisiting the motif till his last few works. His early trussed bulls represent not only individual anguish but also the frustrating inability of a nation to break away from its worst impulses. Hoskote says in elucidating the ability of this iconic image to simultaneously convey both private and public torment, “Bearers of uncertainty and creatures of unrest, Tyeb’s figures are at once archetypal and indicative of ordinary experience, formal symbols of suffering and oppression that also encode real gestures of hurt and trauma.” (Hoskote, p. 19)

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