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Lot Essay
In 1954 Tyeb Mehta travelled to Paris and London to study the European Masters, Old and Modern alike. This exposure was a fundamental and formative moment in Mehta's career, allowing him to assimilate and reinterpret the visual vocabulary of the European modernists. His figures in the 50s began to fracture and flatten, and his compositions become anchored by a central protagonist. Untitled (Girl in Love) was painted in 1957, the same year as Mehta's celebrated, Untitled (Man vs Horse), and it was only in these early years that his paintings were signed 'Tyebi', instead of the more recognisable 'Tyeb' of the 60s onwards. With very few paintings from this period to come to auction, Untitled (Girl in Love) is a rare example of the subtle vulnerability of the artist's early paintings, which preceded his gestural abstracted style of the 1960s.
The sculptural plasticity of the forlorn figure perhaps owes to the four months Mehta spent studying sculpture in the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University, Baroda, in 1957, the same year the present canvas was painted. The darkened eyes and hollowed face of Girl in Love also betray the influence of African masks, which were also embraced by Picasso in his cubist works. Their raw potency appealed to Mehta's sensibilities and informed his depiction of human faces.
It was at this time that Mehta encountered the writings of the French Existentialists, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and André Malraux, which affirmed his lifelong pre-occupation with the fate and the frailty of human existence. "These gurus of the age informed Tyeb and his contemporaries in their understanding of human vulnerability, the scope of choice available within the limitations imposed by social convention, [and] the degrees of freedom that the individual could wrest from the realm of necessity." (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 6) Rendered with a touching sense of femininity and innocence, the subject of this painting is helpless; powerless to her condition, her love. The air of melancholy on this young girl's countenance perhaps suggests a love lost, unrequited or unanswered. Untitled (Girl in Love) is a jewel in Tyeb Mehta's oeuvre - a disarming painting that revels in the naive fragility of humanity.
The sculptural plasticity of the forlorn figure perhaps owes to the four months Mehta spent studying sculpture in the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University, Baroda, in 1957, the same year the present canvas was painted. The darkened eyes and hollowed face of Girl in Love also betray the influence of African masks, which were also embraced by Picasso in his cubist works. Their raw potency appealed to Mehta's sensibilities and informed his depiction of human faces.
It was at this time that Mehta encountered the writings of the French Existentialists, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and André Malraux, which affirmed his lifelong pre-occupation with the fate and the frailty of human existence. "These gurus of the age informed Tyeb and his contemporaries in their understanding of human vulnerability, the scope of choice available within the limitations imposed by social convention, [and] the degrees of freedom that the individual could wrest from the realm of necessity." (R. Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta, Images and Exchanges, New Delhi, 2005, p. 6) Rendered with a touching sense of femininity and innocence, the subject of this painting is helpless; powerless to her condition, her love. The air of melancholy on this young girl's countenance perhaps suggests a love lost, unrequited or unanswered. Untitled (Girl in Love) is a jewel in Tyeb Mehta's oeuvre - a disarming painting that revels in the naive fragility of humanity.