Origins

The formulation of a ‘rule of thirds’ in visual imagery probably goes back as early as the 1790s when an English engraver and antiquarian, John Thomas Smith wrote about it in his illustrated book 'Remarks on Rural Scenery' (1797). In a passage responding to the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds’ discussion on balancing light and shade in painting, he wrote: 'Analogous to this "Rule of thirds", (if I may be allowed so to call it) I have presumed to think that, in connecting or in breaking the various lines of a picture, it would likewise be a good rule to do it, in general, by a similar scheme of proportion; for example, in a design of landscape, to determine the sky at about two-thirds; or else at about one-third, so that the material objects might occupy the other two: In short, in applying this invention, generally speaking, or to any other case, whether of light, shade, form, or color, I have found the ratio of about two thirds to one third, or of one to two, a much better and more harmonizing proportion, then the precise formal half...'

Painters used this ‘thumb-rule’ towards different ends, and not always to foreground or plot objects of focus in their work, or even use a strictly diagonal line. An Indian modern artist who responded to this method after an impasse had been reached in his creative life was Tyeb Mehta, a member of the famous Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group that included others such as M. F. Husain, F. N. Souza and S. H. Raza, many of them religious minorities after the partition of India in 1947. Born in a Gujarati Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community and growing up in Bombay (now Mumbai), Mehta would reference the violence of partition in increasingly formalised ways over his career.

EVOLUTIONS

Artists responded quickly to Newman. Robert Rauschenberg attempted to parody it with his work Automobile Tire Print (1953), where he imitated the zip-line with a skid-mark produced by a car tyre driven over glued sheets of paper covered in black house paint.

Tyeb Mehta’s encounter with Newman’s paintings—towards the end of the 1960s, when he was spending a year in New York on a Rockefeller Foundation grant—provoked a desire to re-formulate the relationship between figure and sensuous fields of colour, as suggested by writer Ranjit Hoskote. Just as critics have argued for the psychological impact of the Holocaust on Newman’s use of the zip-line across the canvas, the diagonal method also becomes a way to reference the traumatic rupture caused by the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 for Mehta—an event that destroyed the imagination of a common past while clearing the way to imagine new communities of the future.

'The moment I use the diagonal, the square splits, it gets a momentum, it gets activated. Otherwise the square is a very static form. Well, I destroyed the painting by using the diagonal; I took black paint and put the diagonal on the painting. Immediately I realised that I had separated the lower and the upper portion and I could use the areas of colours, which is what I was trying to do. Then I used the diagonal in many ways, it became a pictorial element. It became a means of dislocating the image in any area of the canvas.' (Tyeb Mehta)