Holland Cotter: After Midnight

In 1997, Jane Farver, the farsighted and much-loved American curator who died in April, put together an influential exhibition called "Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora" at the Queens Museum. It was one of the few surveys of its kind up to that time, and Farver was careful to advertise it as a broad sampler. Now, that exhibition's successor, "After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997", is at the same museum. This time all of the artists are South Asian-born. It is basically two distinct shows, one of Modernist painting of the 1950s and 1960s, the other of multimedia work from the past few years, both defined by the traumatic event in the exhibition title.

The earlier, "Modern" section, with just eight artists, is more focused. All were students or young professionals in Bombay at Independence. As the Progressive Artists Group, they saw themselves as an avant-garde and shared a sense of living in a cultural pressure cooker. They could make up Modernism as they went.

They all worked in European-style oil-on-canvas medium, but at least one of them, F N Souza, also painted with chemical solvents in an invented technique.

M F Husain applied a Cubist-inflected Expressionism to Hindu religious subjects. S H Raza soaked himself in 17th century Rajput court art and in Cezanne.

V S Gaitonde and Akbar Padamsee moved toward abstraction without ever entirely detaching from landscape painting. Ram Kumar hit the same balance with cityscapes after a kind of conversion experience in the holy city of Varanasi.

All, but in particular Tyeb Mehta and Krishen Khanna, were deeply affected by the political stresses of the era. In his 1948 painting "News of Gandhiji's Death", Mr Khanna depicts a crowd of stunned citizens reading newspapers, the papers' white pages filling the picture like a shroud. The vulnerability that Mehta felt as a Muslim at the time of partition never left him. It underlies his repeated images of broken and tumbling bodies.

Maybe because oil painting, however varied, speaks a naturally autographic language, the Modern section feels very much of a piece and very much a conversation. The contemporary part of the show, with more than twice as many artists, does not. The fact that it reflects art's pluralist, multimedia present is one reason.

Centrally placed, Subodh Gupta's "What Does the Vessel Contain That the River Does Not?", from 2014, a wooden boat piled high with tattered blankets, clothes and cooking pots, the basic needs of a self-sufficient life, looks effective here. So does Jitish Kallat's set of five big buckling mirrors with the words of Nehru's "tryst with destiny" speech seared like scars onto their surface.

More surprisingly, much subtler quasi-architectural pieces by the New York-based Conceptualist Sreshta Rit Premnath work here, too. One has life-size photographic images of sleeping migrant workers pressed behind sheets of industrial plastic; another is composed of aluminium tubing, measuring tapes and what look like carpets of moulded sand. Both make smart use of an under-construction aesthetic to bring the museum itself into a larger story about globalism as a force at once accommodating and crushing.

Altogether, this part of the show is persuasive only when taken as the sum of its individual parts, and certain of those parts are better presented than others.

A jumpy video called "Noise Life 1" by the Desire Machine Collective gets a room of its own, a good idea. Another, by the veteran Raqs Media Collective is embedded in atmospheric library-laboratory installation that complements a photographic work by Dayanita Singh memorialising the fate of fragile, half-forgotten manuscript archives.

The idea of the archive - preserves of things hoarded, catalogued and consulted to create meaning - looms large. Atul Dodiya displays photographs that line up Nazi atrocities, ethnic attacks in India and 9/11. Prajakta Potnis, the exhibition's youngest artist (born in 1980), combines slides of kitchen appliances, recordings of her mother reciting recipes and references to 1950s Cold War ideology to undermine the comforting fiction of something called home. And Mithu Sen has arranged, under a glowing transparent dome, a personal collection of trinkets, charms, dolls, votive images and sex toys as a mini-museum in which sensuous and sacred are equally valued.

Finally, the performance artist Nikhil Chopra is a walking archive of cultural types. In the guise of a character named Yog Raj Chitrakar, he shows up in various places - Mumbai, New York City, Havana - as a day labourer, a prince, a soldier and a dandy, filming himself and making drawings of his surroundings wherever he goes. The drawings would look at home in the Modern section; the films are entirely of the YouTube now.

And they are in a prime spot in the museum, along the ramp surrounding its great New York City panorama, which is itself a model for what a contemporary South Asian survey should be: a heaven's-eye view of history, comprehensive but fully detailed, with Farver looking, delightedly, down.

© The New York Times News Service 2015