South Asia Through Modernist Binoculars

South Asia Through Modernist Binoculars

‘Radical Terrain' at the Rubin Museum of Art

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Radical Terrain, at the Rubin Museum of Art, features H. A. Gade's "Civilization" mounted on Marc Handelman's "Dimension Stone XXVIII."

“Radical Terrain” is the last of three small, carefully judged, back-to-back exhibitions in the series Modernist Art From India at the Rubin Museum of Art. How lucky New York is to have a museum willing and able to do such shows, unfamiliar in content but large with history. If we relied on our big institutions, which so often spoon-feed us what we already know, we would be unaware that India even had a modern art, never mind one of variety and complexity.

"The Fall" (1998) by Sudhir Patwardhan, among the more contemporary pieces in "Radical Terrain" at the Rubin Museum.

Each of the earlier shows was built around a broad art genre: figurative painting in one case, abstraction in the other. And each was made up of work done roughly between 1947, when India became independent from colonial rule, and the 1990s, when contemporary South Asian art began to merge into the global flow. “Radical Terrain” focuses on a third genre, landscape painting, and complicates the time frame by adding new work by youngish artists: some Indian, some not.

The West tends to be proprietorial about Modernism, treating it as a Euro-American invention copied, in inferior versions, by the rest of the world. But more and more this view has come to look parochial and wrong. In recent years historians have been studying the reality of multiple (sometimes referred to as alternative) modernisms that developed in Africa, Asia and South America parallel with, or sometimes in advance of, what was happening in Europe.

Some scholars have proposed that the Western concept of Modernism, as an impulse of onward-and-upward cultural progress, was partly a product of colonialism, a fiction created to support another fiction, that of nonprogressing primitivism - which, by Darwinian logic, the West was destined to correct and entitled to exploit.

Whatever the facts, to ambitious artists in 20th-century India, Modernism presented a challenge: How do you make art that can be viable in a market defined largely in Western terms but can retain a specifically Indian identity? Responses to this question form a conversational thread that runs through the Rubin show.

One answer came very early in the 20th century, from the so-called Bengal School of Art, centered in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Led by the nationalistically minded painter Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), the movement took the academic realism taught in 19th-century art schools under the British Raj and filtered it through Indian historical styles exemplified by Mughal miniatures and the ancient Buddhist murals at Ajanta.

From this mix artists came up with a romantic vision of India couched in visual terms palatable to a colonial audience but focused on the myth of the country's spiritualized rural past, presented as a direct contrast to the West's materialistic, urbanized present.

As the century went on, Indian artists remained fascinated by cultural developments in the West. When the first exhibition of German Bauhaus paintings opened in Calcutta in 1922, the work of figures like Kandinsky and Paul Klee electrified the city's vanguard art world. Comparable surveys in other South Asian cities provided imported raw material to be examined, processed and transformed into new use.

Through the 1930s and '40s indigenous Indian modernist movements proliferated, in cities like Baroda, Madras, New Delhi and Bombay (now Mumbai). In the art itself, certain opposing, often overlapping elements were in constant play: urban and rural imagery, naturalism and abstraction, nationalism and internationalism, the political and the personal. A spectrum of highly individualistic voices emerged, as is evident in the tiny cross section represented by the Rubin show, organized by Beth Citron, an assistant curator at the museum who was also responsible for the previous installments of the series.

Although the show has no examples of Bengal School painting, an undated gouache river scene by Narayan Shridhar Bendre (1910-92) recalls the idealizing, bucolic, precolonial vision of such work. And rural landscape painting continued to flourish, as artists like Ramkinker Baij, Gopal Ghose and Jehangir Sabavala traveled the countryside, sometimes on bicycle, documenting the topography of the new, immensely diverse nation.

At the same time, as India became more industrialized, the city became a recurrent subject. Some artists came up with urban images almost as idyllic as any country scene. In a 1945 painting by Syed Haider Raza, Bombay is a dust cloud of light, bright expressionist strokes, with a mosque glowing at its center. And in a 1960s picture by Abdul-Rahim Apabhai Almelkar, Varanasi - India's holiest city, set on the banks of the Ganges - is an aquamarine fantasy of umbrellas and temple spires.

Not every city image is benign. In the 1950s Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) - a founding member of the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay, intent on creating an Indian Modernism as an extension of international Modernism - worked in a slashing, expressionist mode reminiscent of Rouault and Soutine. In his 1958 “House With Trees,” with its clawlike tree branches and peaked roof seen in sharp black silhouette, nature and civilization seem equally demonic.

And in two of the show's most striking paintings, town and country meet with a bad-dream jolt. In “Peasant in the City,” from the 1960s, by Krishna Shamrao Kulkarni (1916-94), a man and cow cower wide-eyed with alarm under a toppling wall of Cubistic geometry. In Gieve Patel's 1993 “Battered Body in Landscape” a skeletal corpse, washed up on what could be one of the beaches near Bombay, is an emblem of the violence, usually but not always urban, that has swept the nation repeatedly since independence and the partition of India and Pakistan.

Viewers coming to these works for the first time, knowing little about their history or context, may well see traces of European Modernism in them before anything else. It takes some looking and exposure to information to get beyond that and see what is really happening in these paintings. They aren't about copying; they're about artists making choices, trying out options, pursuing some, rejecting others, taking what they know and adding to it, editing it, blurring lines between South Asian and Western, shaping something distinctive from the sources used.

Such cross-cultural give and take is the dynamic of a lot of today's contemporary art, as suggested in the work of a handful of young international artists selected by Ms. Citron to complement the older art in the show.

She places, for example, a suite of recent near-abstract sky paintings by the New York contemporary artist Byron Kim next to a near-abstract from 1963 of a summer night sky by Mr. Raza. The Raza piece was painted by an Indian artist working in Paris of 1963; the most recent of Mr. Kim's pictures was done on the roof of the Rubin Museum in December of this year. A shared sensibility, across time and cultures, is clear at a glance.

Similarly, 2012 architectural photo-collages by Seher Shah, an artist born in Pakistan in 1975 and now living in Brooklyn, gain resonance from being paired with a 1991 cityscape by the veteran Indian painter Ram Kumar. With gray wash on paper Mr. Kumar turns an unnamed town into a ghostly, ashen grid. Ms. Shah takes images of a specific Indian city - Chandigarh, with utopian architecture designed by Le Corbusier - and slices them into inorganic abstract strips. The two artists, one modernist, the other postmodernist, use very different visual languages to speak of a universal subject: reality and illusion and how they meet in art.

It's great that the Rubin, a small institution with limited resources but imaginative thinking, has brought us exhibitions like this one and its two predecessors. Even together, though, these shows can only hint at the full history of global modernism, or modernisms, that everyone now knows is the true story of modern art. It's a story that has yet to make its way into our big museums, but surely that day must come.

A version of this review appeared in print on December 28, 2012, on page C29 of the New York edition with the headline: South Asia Through Modernist Binoculars.