Bharat Ratna: Jewels of Modern Indian Art

Decades of colonialist kitsch, Bollywood films and third-hand Hindu spiritualism have combined to give even many relatively intelligent people a skewed perception of Indian arts and culture. Bharat Ratna: Jewels of Modern Indian Art subtly demystifies the subcontinent by focusing on how mid-to-late 20th century Indian artists interacted with worldwide artistic trends. Only Krishnaji Howlaji Ara's Bharata Natya, an impressionistic scene of a classical Indian dance performance, predates India's 1947 independence; tellingly, it's also the most conventional painting on display, both in form and subject. Sometimes the commentary is direct: Krishen Khanna's Quartet (1956) shows the influence of Georges Braque's cubist paintings of musicians, and Arpita Singh's Munna Appa's Kitchen (1994) borrows perhaps too heavily from American folk art cliches. More often, subtle evocations of artists more familiar to western museum-goers (the playfulness of Joan Miro, Mark Rothko's moody washes of pure color) inform the paintings without overpowering them. Consisting of fewer than 20 paintings arranged along either side of a short corridor in the Museum of Fine Arts' Asian wing, Bharat Ratna is a brief but powerful introduction to an under-represented artistic tradition.