Tyeb Mehta's bull run continues: 2nd priciest Indian painting at 61.8cr

The bull run seems to be truly on in the Indian market, and who better to capture its animal spirits than Tyeb Mehta, the celebrated modernist who made the bull his enduring motif?

Less than a fortnight after a work by his contemporary M F Husain joined the Rs 100-crore club, Mehta's 'Trussed Bull' (1956) went for Rs 61.8 crore ($7.27 million), becoming the second most expensive Indian painting sold at auction globally. It is now tied with Amrita Sher-Gil 's 'The Story Teller', which sold for the same price in 2023. Mehta's powerful image of a shackled and subjugated bull went for nearly nine times its higher estimate at a Saffronart auction in Mumbai on Wednesday.

This is not the first time Mehta, who lived in Mumbai most of his life and passed away in 2009, has raised the bar for Indian art. In 2002, his triptych, 'Celebration', from The Times of India's collection, made history as the first modern Indian artwork to sell for over a crore (Rs 1.5 crore at Christie's).



His work is worth crores, but Tyeb struggled most of his life

It was a Tyeb work again ('Mahishasura') which crossed the $1m mark for the first time in 2005. Now, he has set another benchmark for Indian art. Wednesday's auction was also a benchmark for homegrown auction house Saffronart, which celebrated its 25th anniversary with an auction that raked in a record-breaking $25 million. "It's a global record for an Indian art auction . It shows the strength of the art market when other asset classes are struggling," said Dinesh Vazirani, Saffronart CEO and co-founder. "It's even more meaningful because it is Mehta's centenary year."

The proceeds will go to the Mehta family since the work was from their collection. For most of his life, the artist lived in a cramped one-room apartment that was studio by day and bedroom at night. It was only in the 1990s that he and his wife Sakina could afford to move into a two-bedroom place in Lokhandwala. "Like many other artist wives of that period, Sakina supported him. She used to work as a teacher," said Kishore Singh, senior VP at DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery).

His work now goes for sums that are as jaw-dropping as his pregnant Kali and avenging yet tender Durga but to talk of Mehta purely in terms of zeroes does no justice to the man and the ideals he lived by. "The power of painting was far more important to him than the prices it commanded," said Singh, narrating an anecdote from Delhi gallerist Arun Vadehra who was close to Mehta. "Arun used to have one of his paintings hanging in his office. One day, Mehta took it away, only to replace it later with another work. When Arun asked, he said he had ripped the earlier painting because he wasn't happy with it. Tyeb may not have been very prolific but he stayed true to his art."

Mehta's strong imagery was always rooted in his life, with his canvases charting the tumult around him - the horrors of Partition, the struggles of a newly independent India and the violence of the 1992 Bombay riots. In an interview, he recounted his memories of Partition. "At the time, I was living on Mohammed Ali Road, which was virtually a Muslim ghetto. 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." Those images haunted him for life, as did the sight of bullocks being led to slaughter at an abattoir in Bombay. The bull, Mehta later said, was important to him on many levels. "The way they tie up the animal's legs and fling it on the floor of the slaughterhouse before butchering it... you feel something very vital has been lost. The trussed bull also seemed representative of the national condition... the mass of humanity unable to channel or direct its tremendous energies..."

In the winter of his life, Mehta's vision was impaired. "Those primary colours that he used so much was because his sight was affected," explained Singh. But he continued to paint, a perfectionist till the end.