Untitled

The late 1960s was a seminal period in the career of Tyeb Mehta, much like the early Sixties was for the career of his fellow Progressive, S. H. Raza. It is often referred to as a breakthrough in Mehta’s career, when his first encounter with an original Barnett Newman artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York spurred him to the path of creating distorted figures in flat planes of colours slashed by a diagonal. In that sense, this Untitled work is iconic for being the last of the previous phase from the artist’s career, whose complete flowering was necessary for him to move into realms yonder. Coming from a threshold moment of his career, it carries the seeds of the following glory in the huddle of the anguished figures, almost as a precursor to the focussed, slashed flat-plane figures of the following period.