New Delhi, May 10 -- The first public walkthrough of Epochal: The Period of Pioneers, a joint exhibition by Chatterjee & Lal and DAG in Mumbai, was packed to the rafters last month. Around 250 people turned up on a hot Saturday afternoon to see this showcase of modernists such as K.S. Kulkarni, Benode Behari Mukherjee, J. Swaminathan, B. Prabha, and A.A. Raiba. Epochal establishes oftoverlooked connections between artistic practices and the sociopolitical landscape of the times.

It took Mortimer Chatterjee, curator of the exhibition and director of Chatterjee & Lal, one-and-a-half years to put together this project spanning 118 paintings from 1877 to the late 1980s. The focus, however, is on works created immediately after independence-1...