Modern and Contemporary Indian Art on Display at Queens Museum

Many Indians consider 1947 to be the separation year. It’s when the largely Hindu southeast Asian country gained independence from England and when Muslims began to move northwest and east to build nations in what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh.

That year also marked the emergence of Indian modern art, led by the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and its contemporaries who made requisite visits to Europe and experimented with such genres as post-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism.

This era lasted until 1997, when the globalized contemporary art world hit India, and new themes like environmentalism, urbanization and religious fundamentalism began to figure prominently in the mindset of the creative class. The Queens  Museum is currently exhibiting After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997, which depicts these two phases simultaneously.