The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

By LEE LAWRENCE
New York
Rubin Museum of Art
Through Oct. 16

When friend and fellow artist Akbar Padamsee was—as a 1954 issue of the Bombay Sentinel termed it—"charge-sheeted" for obscenity, M.F. Husain came to his defense. Husain argued to the prosecutors that in Mr. Padamsee's painting, "Lovers," a man was not holding a woman's breast; straight lines and flat planes of color were crossing a circle. These "geometrical structures," he added, are "what you see in the folk art of India."

The case—whose outcome set a precedent for artistic freedom still invoked in Indian courts—features in an ingeniously simple timeline created by Beth Citron, assistant curator at the Rubin Museum of Art. Posted on the museum's website, it accompanies "Modernist Art From India," a continuing series of shows Ms. Citron has curated to explore artistic developments and experimentations in India and by Indians from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Peabody Essex Museum
'The Diagonal' (1974) by Tyeb Mehta.

The lower track of the timeline highlights landmark events in the rise of Indian nationalism through the country's independence in 1947 and chronicles postindependence history until the early 1990s. The upper register, meanwhile, features seminal events in the lives of individual artists and in the country's art scene as a whole. It starts with the foundation of Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan school of art in 1901, just six years after the birth of the Indian National Congress, and ends with exhibitions both at home and abroad in the late 1980s. The stage was set for the splash Indian artists were to make in the international art market in the following decade.

The value of the Rubin's "Modernist Art From India" series is that it provides some background to that splash without, for all that, trying to "explain" it. The timeline does not draw neat correlations between politics and art—sometimes they exist, sometimes they don't—just as the series' second and current show, "Approaching Abstraction," does not construct a cohesive, chronological narrative. Ms. Citron has grouped its 30 or so works by author under headings that capture the thrust of each artist's approach to abstraction—"Abstracting Language," "Marks of Minimalism," "Architectural Abstractions," "Formalist Abstraction," and so forth.

Granted, logistics and budget dictated that Ms. Citron could bring in only works from nearby collections in the Northeast—more than half of those in "Approaching Abstraction" are from individuals and institutions in New York. The selection is therefore by no means all-inclusive, but it does a good job of delineating various trends animating India's modernist art scene. These range from Zarina Hashmi's mid-1970s monochromatic, textured prints or Nasreen Mohamedi's spare, pencil and ink drawings on grid paper (c. 1977) to the controlled exuberance of Krishna Reddy's "Great Clown" (1981) and the impasto of Shanti Dave's "Accordance" (1963), where the layers of paint are occasionally scraped away, leaving an after-image as revealing and ephemeral as reflections on water.

Ironically, while Eastern mysticism propelled Europeans like Wassily Kandinsky toward an abstract visual expression, only two of the artists here telegraph a connection to spirituality. Biren De's and Gulam Rasool Santosh's paintings, from 1962 and 1980 respectively, play with symbolic language of the esoteric practice of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, even though, it turns out, neither artist was a practitioner. More interesting is the work by V.S. Gaitonde, a reclusive artist whose understanding and practice of Zen Buddhism propelled a lifelong quest to achieve a purity of form and color. Credited with pioneering the abstract in India, Gaitonde is represented here by two works. "Painting, 4" (1962) shows the vestiges of representation in markings that could be human figures or calligraphic symbols; in his 1964 untitled painting, coincidentally created during a year-long fellowship in New York, he strips away representation altogether, leaving a field of texture and color.

There are also some direct references to India. In Tyeb Mehta's "The Diagonal" (1974), for example, a jagged diagonal line splits a figure. This is a recurring image for Mehta, who witnessed the brutal killings and violence that flared when the country, at independence, was partitioned into India and Pakistan. And two short movies—Husain's "Through the Eyes of a Painter" (1967) and Mehta's "Koodal" (1969-70)—were shot in India. They run about 17 and 14 minutes, respectively, and plunge viewers into the forms and rhythms that these artists saw in the India that surrounded them.

So much variety packed into a small show makes it feel kaleidoscopic and splintered—yet therein lies its honesty. What comes through is that independence brought with it a measure of freedom for artists, both from the European models imposed by British colonialism and from the nationalist dictates of India's freedom struggle.

The artists on view do not appear uniformly compelled to proclaim their "Indianness," nor do they evidence the need to articulate an overarching ideology for their forays into abstract art. Indeed, many bounce back and forth between styles—a handful of these artists were also featured in the series' first show, "Body Unbound," and some will recur in the third part of the series, "Radical Terrain," which opens Nov. 9 and will explore artists' treatment of landscape. And while some find their moorings in European art, others, like Husain, arrive at a modernist stance through indigenous Indian art forms.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

A version of this article appeared August 30, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Subcontinental Drift.