HOW ART DECO FOUND ITS WAY INTO FILIPINO HOMES

The pathway that Art Deco took to conquer the world leads from Paris.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

Cymbalist sculpture on narra Deco side table

But in the Philippines, Art Deco came from America.

As the new exhibit "Art Deco: Modernity and Design in the Philippines, 1925 to 1950" makes clear, the Americans here in the 1930s brought their treasured Art Deco décor, furniture and knickknacks with them from New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and these items led Filipinos to try their own hand at the style.

The just-opened exhibit at the National Museum of Fine Arts, unveiled in the "Spoliarium" Hall after opening remarks and a bit of period-era jazz from soprano Pauline Therese Arejola, covers two galleries and ranges from locally made furniture and dressers, ornate armoires and mirrors, to Flapper-style ternos, fountain pens (some supplied by "Penman" Butch Dalisay), busts and statues, and architectural models of key Art Deco-style buildings and structures in Manila, such as the Manila Metropolitan Theater, Rizal Memorial Coliseum, Misamis Oriental Capitol Building, the First United Building in Manila and the Quezon Memorial Shrine.

Paris showcased the Art Deco movement at the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, and the world took notice. As the show's title suggests, Art Deco brought a sense of exuberance and modernity to design — shown in movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and the lavish decor of the Roaring Twenties. That optimism was tempered by the Great Depression and WWII, but the spirit of Art Deco lived on. (You can even see it in the Oz design of the new Wicked sequel.)