Tyeb Mehta painting fetches £1.38 million

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Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura

Indian painter Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura, 1996, the most important painting from his ground-breaking series, was on Monday sold for £1.385 million by Christie’s in London. The painting had been estimated to sell for between £1.2 million and £1.8 million.
A painting, Untitled (Figure on Rickshaw), by Mehta, who passed away in 2009, was sold for record price of £1.973 million at the Christie’s auction in London in June last year. Mehta’s Mahishasura was the first Indian contemporary painting to have crossed the million-dollar barrier in 2005 when it was sold for nearly $1.6 million.
The Tyeb painting is “heavily inspired by ancient mythology and Hindu literature, Mahishasura recounts the legend whereby the Brahmin demon-king Rambha produces an invincible son through his union with a she-buffalo,”
The Tyeb Mehta painting has been compared to Picasso’s Guernica. “Mehta fuses ancient imagery with simplicity of form, colour and line, resulting in powerfully modern works full of fresh vitality.
Stylistic devices evident in the present work — such as the simultaneity of perspective and figures, the juxtaposition of linear and volumed representation, and varying frontal and profiled angles of vision — conjure images of Pablo Picasso’s pivotal work, Guernica.
Just as Mehta was inspired by the bull, Picasso also regularly depicted multiple forms of the bull and most often the mythological creature, the Minotaur,” the auction house explained.
A painting by Indian painter Syed Haider Raza, who for many decades was based in France before recently returning to India, called Clocher du Village, sold for £481,250.
The 1958 pianting has been estimated at £450,000 — £600,000. Raza’s Untitled painting from 1980 sold for £121,250 barely reaching the lower estimate of £120,000-£180,000.
However, Cinq Sens, 1958, by M.F. Husain, which was formerly in the collection of the world-renowned Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini and his Indian wife Sonali Dasgupta, was not sold at the auction. The painting had been estimated to sell for £400,000 — £500,000. Husain had gifted the painting to his friend, Rossellini, who left India with new-found love, awareness and creative consciousness.
The Indian modern and contemporary artists do not command high prices in auctions compared to European artists — Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s iconic pastel drawing, The Scream, made history this month as it was auctioned for $119.9 million by Sotheby’s in New York.