Riding the Elephant

First retrospective of India’s leading “Progressive” modernist

Ai Weiwei balances criticism of China with views on India and the West

There were two stars during Delhi’s India Art Fair week earlier this month. One was Ai Weiwei, the leading Chinese dissident artist who was on his first major visit to the country.

The other was Tyeb Mehta, possibly the most distinguished of India’s famous “modern” artists whose 100th birth anniversaries have been celebrated with major exhibitions in recent months.

Both Ai and Tyeb (as he is colloquially known) have tackled the issues and problems of their times. Ai, age 68, continues to attack China’s repression, state power and censorship, though he balanced this with criticisms of India and the West.

Tyeb, who died in 2009 age 83, sought with his peers to develop new artistic styles after India’s independence and reflect on traumas such as the 1947 partition of India creating Pakistan. 

Ai was among the early visitors to the fair on the preview day when he stopped at the Nature Morte stand where one of his Iron Root cast iron sculptures was on view at EUR 300,000 and was later sold. 

I caught him for a few words as he arrived. I’ve always wondered how such a hounded artist keeps going, so asked him whether he had ever thought of giving up.

“I haven’t started yet and I’m quite confused because there is so much that is attractive but also not,” he said, fingering a loose button on my shirt collar. The button came off in his hand and he gave it to me saying “When I was young and a button came off, I kept it because I was so poor, though now I am no longer poor”.

Speaking during a series of events and interviews, he seemed to be taking care to balance his remarks on China with criticisms of India and the West. He visited China last December (2025) for the first time in 15 years to see his 93-year-old mother. He stayed three weeks without problems and left freely. Earlier he had been imprisoned (2011), had his passport confiscated and been harassed by police.

“Right now, India as a society may be more democratic, but there is also a lot of disparity … China is more even as a society, but it has a one-party system, which is a big difference,” he said while visiting Nature Morte’s gallery on the outskirts of Delhi for his first-ever solo exhibition in India.

In another interview he said: “Classically, the so-called West has pointed fingers at China or those with more authoritarian states, but I have been censored in the West very often. There is strong censorship in Western universities, in art, in writing, in media, in everything. No longer can fingers be pointed at China. If you are doing that, you are a hypocrite and have double standards”.

Tyeb retrospective

Attempts have been made to stage a Tyeb retrospective for 15 years or more. The success this month was due to an initiative started by the Saffronart Foundation, set up by the South Asian art auction market leader of that name. Saffronart approached the Tyeb Mehta Foundation, and then involved Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art (KNMA). That led to the show being curated by Roobina Karode, the museum’s artistic director. 

“Tyeb came at a time of great struggle when all the Progressives were seeking foundational language in the name of modernism,” said Karode, referring to the Mumbai based group of artists founded in 1947. The question was “how to reflect the transformation that the country was going through”.

Tyeb was a leading member of the Progressives. Others included F.N. Souza (who died in 2002) and Krishen Khanna, now 100, both of whom have had recent commemorative exhibitions.  

Tyeb was “the most introverted’ of the Progressives and stayed away from the limelight”. Krishen Khanna had said that he was “a better artist” than the rest of the group. He came from a cinema family and was initially drawn to films but switched to painting in art college.

Titled Bearing Weight (with the lightness of being), the KNMA exhibition consists of 120 works including 70 paintings along with drawings, sculptures and a 1970 film plus letters and other archival material.

The works display Tyeb’s instantly recognisable themes and images of a rickshaw puller, a bull, a falling figure and a bird that dominate almost all his works. They demonstrate human hardships, conflict, violence and resilience. Often there is an iconic diagonal line to split the theme.

A bull was a compulsive image for Tyeb throughout his life from the time he drew them at an abattoir in the 1950s.

The exhibition includes Trussed Bull (1956). Loaned to the exhibition by its owner, this powerful painting is one of two works with this name sold at Saffronart auctions last year. This one fetched Rs 56.4 crore ($6,4m) in October 2025 but the other one was sold for Rs61.80 crore ($7.3m) six months earlier, making it the most valuable Tyeb Mehta work at auction.

Partition was a major theme, as it was for others of this generation including Satish Gujral, an artist, who died in 2020 and whose 100th birth anniversary has been celebrated with three exhibitions in Delhi. These include an expansive and dramatic retrospective in the National Gallery of Modern Art that shows how this reclusive artist (and architect), who suffered from a serious loss of hearing, stood aside from the Progressives and developed his own distinctive style.

With 135 exhibitors including 83 galleries and 16 museums, the 17th edition of the art fair was its usual success, drawing in masses of young visitors as well as collectors ranging from beginners to top business people and museum owners. 

The fair took place at a time when galleries and auction houses say the majority of buyers are Indian and new to the market. Enthusiasm varied but good sales were reported by galleries such as Delhi’s Vadehra, DAG and Dhoomimal, and by Continua and David Zwirner from abroad.