The Jamshyd & Pheroza Godrej Collection is the fruit of a decades-long collecting practice that is eclectic in its appetite for diverse forms of art-making. Its scope ranges from works by established modernists to work by lesser known artists of rural heritage. It embraces a range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, fibre art, and photography. Rather than being fixated on a masterpiece-oriented approach, this collection has been especially hospitable to historically under-regarded artistic practices. The aesthetic and the ethical mandates are closely entwined in the workings of this collection. It has championed the historically less favoured media – such as printmaking, ceramics, photography, and the work of artists of rural or ‘tribal’ heritage – while being fully engaged with art by practitioners working in the modernist lineages of painting and sculpture. The collection has evolved through a pattern of convergence with and divergence from the Cymroza Art Gallery’s programme, and, despite its name, is an inter-generational project. It includes works collected by Navroze Godrej, representing the next generation of the family and gesturing towards an open-ended continuity.

What unifies this collection, as this exhibition will demonstrate, is its foundational belief in a ‘lost spectrum’ – a continuum in which all the arts were honoured as articulations of a dynamic creativity that operated across differences of social milieu, formal medium, and aesthetic framework. This belief animated the work of pioneering Indian cultural thinkers and institution-builders like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar. They made little distinction between so-called ‘fine artists’ and so-called ‘craftspersons’, the glossaries of international modernism and the vocabularies of re-invented local tradition, genres sanctified by canonical taste and genres pushed to the peripheries of connoisseurial attention. Mapping the Lost Spectrum celebrates this spirit of expansive responsiveness to creativity in its
manifold avatars, which should inspire future collectors and collections.

(Text by Ranjit Hoskote)