Painters of India who forge a new art in the first years after independence

From 1947 to 1956, the dozen or so painters of the Progressive Artists' Group, forged a rebellious, forward-looking new style that could serve as the artistic model for a new, secular republic

When I was a student of art history, the textbooks offered a simple, tidy and wrong story of painting after 1945. The first years after World War II were taught as a clean baton pass from Picasso to Pollock: The New York School led the way; Europe got a brief and sometimes sneering look; and begrudging attention was paid to the avant-gardes of just a few rich non-Western nations (the Concretists of Brazil, the Gutai artists of Japan).

Slowly, too slowly, museums are now taking up the task of rewriting the history of art since 1945 as more than just a