Viva art deco

Once in a while a book comes along that excites your imagination with a feast for both the eyes and the brain, and one such book that I came across recently was Art Deco in the Philippines, edited by Lourdes Reyes Montinola and published last year by ArtPostAsia. I chanced upon the book while waiting to interview “Lourds” — as her friends call her — for the biography of a dear friend of hers whom she had met in New York where she was a young college student just after the War.

As I Ieafed through the pages one visual delight followed another, and when Lourds stepped out to meet me I told her how wonderful I thought the book was, and asked where I could buy a copy. She seemed somewhat surprised that a baby boomer like me could be so interested in Art Deco, but I wasn’t just being polite.

Beng and I have been Art Deco fans for the longest time, smitten by the style’s clean lines and curves, the sublime embodiment of early 20th-century Modernism and its obsession with motion and speed. (The term itself comes from a 1925 Paris exhibition titled the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.) It’s most visible, of course, in architecture, but you can also find its unmistakable imprint on everything from jewelry and fashion to cutlery and, yes, fountain pens.

No stranger to clear, poised prose — her two previous books, Piña (Amon Foundation, 1991) and Breaking the Silence (UP Press, 1996), won National Book Awards — Dr. Montinola applies her connoisseur’s eye to a style that swept the world and inevitably reached the Philippines through such architects who studied abroad as Tomas Mapua, Juan Nakpil, and Juan Arellano.

As she notes in her preface, “The mid-1930s brought about American Deco, manifested in New York skyscrapers and by the ‘streamlined’ look. It spread to as far as Japan, India, Australia, and Shanghai. Although the Philippines is at the farthest end of the map, its gifted architects came home from abroad and created works of art inspired by their observations but adapted to their own culture. Some of these works were their interpretations of Art Deco.

The Art Deco facade of the First United Bank building on the Escolta

“Its official reign was from 1910 to 1939, but in the Philippines it lasted into the 1940s and thereafter, in some records. Here, as in the rest of the world, cinemas and palaces of pleasure were among the buildings constructed in the Art Deco style.”

Beng and I have sought out Art Deco wherever we’ve traveled from Manhattan to Shanghai, without forgetting that some great examples can still be found here at home. Just strolling along the Escolta a couple of years ago, for instance, we were able to spot and photograph some buildings whose Art Deco facades managed to survive the War (not to mention the wrecking ball that took out the jai-alai fronton, and the no-less-criminal neglect that let the Metropolitan Theater go to rot — again — after it had been so meticulously restored in 1978.)

The Montinola book — to which Art Deco enthusiasts Gerard Rey Lico, Manuel Maximo Lopez del Castillo-Noche, John Silva, and Augusto Villalon contributed — chronicles past and present specimens of the finest in Art Deco architecture in Manila, Iloilo, and Quezon. These include, most notably, the aforementioned Metropolitan Theater, which Lourds was fortunate to have had photographed before it fell into its present disrepair, and the showcase campus of Far Eastern University, the board of which she chairs. We are privileged to enter the Hidalgo-Lim house on Vito Cruz in Manila, designed and built in 1930 by Juan Nakpil, and to savor its indigenized Deco details. We discover that, where the Philippine National Bank now stands on the Escolta, a magnificent Crystal Arcade once stood in the 1930s, “the first shopping mall to introduce a walkway leading to the glass-walled shops on the first level.”

Elsewhere in the Philippines, we visit Art Deco palaces in Baguio, Dagupan, and Iloilo. We see how three future National Artists — Botong Francisco, Juan Nakpil, and Victorio Edades — took part in creating a mural for Capitol Theater on the Escolta. It’s not a terribly big book, and clearly much room is left for more material (Lourds would tell me later that, since copies of the book began to circulate among friends, leads have poured in about other Art Deco treasures around the country). But as a pioneering foray into the documentation of this important art movement in the country, it’s an invaluable contribution to the literature, and to raising our general consciousness of another threatened aspect of our cultural heritage.

I learned from Lourds that the book had been published as a limited edition for largely private distribution, but if you like Art Deco as much as we do, you’ll have a chance to buy a copy of Art Deco in the Philippines at a public launch that will be held on February 10, a Thursday, 6 pm at the Ayala Museum in Makati. I’d urge you not to miss out on this opportunity to acquire what will surely be a collector’s piece and in any case a delightful read.

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A Wahl-Eversharp Doric and Parker Vacumatic from the Penman’s collection show the best of Deco design.

My recent series on the early presidents of the University of the Philippines drew some interesting responses, two of which I’ll publish here.

Lawyer Antonio C. Pastelero, chairman of the UP Student Council from 1968 to 1969, wrote to point out that “For the sake of historical accuracy, Jose Maria Sison never figured prominently during the UP student activism days during the period I was enrolled in the University, between 1966 to 1970. Furthermore, Carlos P. Romulo was President of UP until January 1969, when he was forced to step down when UP went on a general strike.”

Another lawyer and UP graduate, Rem Maclang, had this to add: “Allow me to insert a facet of Dean Vicente Sinco’s authoritarian mien, as our College of Law dean in 1957, before he became UP president. As a reminder of its pursuit of the tradition of excellence, if you happen to be at the second floor of the UP College of Law building, atop at the entrance to the Dean’s office, is a long unbroken list of first placers in the bar exams from its incipience up to 1953, when the line was abruptly cut. So, there was a gap of three years (1954-1956). During our graduation rites, Dean Sinco, in his characteristic demanding, crisp and somber voice, ended his speech: ‘This class is mandated to restore the tradition of excellence in the bar exams.’ Subsequent events proved him to be not only an intellectual dictator but also a keen prognosticator. True to the mandate given by Dean Sinco, UP College of Law class of 1957, not only grabbed the first place, but seven of the first 10 places!”

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.