When you hear Art Deco, you think glamour. The past often catches the light a little differently in our imagination, as cocktail parties, jazz, and a new sense of freedom come to mind. Emerging in the 1920s, the Art Deco period was an exuberant era less restricted than its preceding, traditional, ornate styles. There was an obsession with modernity, as industries advanced, spotted by economically optimistic periods as well as a world war.
Attitudes also changed, as women entered the workforce and gained suffrage. These affected the look of the time, as design styles surfaced with geometry, symmetry, and sleek forms.
Stepping into the just-right soft light of the National Museum’s ongoing exhibition, “Art Deco: Modernity and Design in the Philippines 1925–1950,” you slip back into this golden age, as the room glows before the sight of any of the objects has time to sink in.
Art Deco echoes
The exhibit spans two rooms. Inside the first is a formidable collection of furniture collected from across the country. Polished hardwood catches light on chrome, brass, and lacquer details. A bed crowned with sunburst carvings lies against geometric blue wallpaper. Nearby are cabinets with aerodynamic curves. Another desk blooms with carved botanical motifs, topped with a banker’s lamp, a clock, and an old-fashioned rotary telephone.
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On display are hairbrushes and mirrors that once sat atop women’s vanities. Highlighted are the embroidered ternos worn by Aurora Quezon and Maria Agoncillo Aguinaldo, awash with geometric cubes that local designers could totally jump off of today.
The exhibit spills into a nearby room with scale models of Art Deco icons, such as Manila’s First United Building and the Manila Metropolitan Theater, the architectural jewel that epitomized the period. The phrase “On the wings of song” inspired architect Juan Arellano for the theater, who designed pavilions flanking the building. Inside are decorative mangoes, bananas, and abaca, now restored to their former glory.
There are also paintings by artists of the time, such as Fabian dela Rosa, Antonio Dumlao, Pablo Amorsolo, and Dominador Castañeda. Outside are preserved reliefs from the Capitol Theater, which is sadly now being demolished.
In this transitory space at the National Museum, for a moment, visitors are thrown back into a fantasy of the Art Deco period between 1925 and 1950, spanning the colonial American era, Commonwealth decade, and post-World War II republic.
Beyond beautiful objects
Conceived by co-curators Ivan Man Dy and Miguel Rosales, together with Arnulfo Dado—museum curator of the National Museum’s Architectural Arts and Built Heritage Division—and with assistance from researcher Brian de Asis, “Art Deco: Modernity and Design in the Philippines 1925–1950” has become one of the National Museum’s success stories. Launched last Nov. 16, 2025 to celebrate the global centennial of the Art Deco movement, it was recently extended until Oct. 25, 2026.
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Featuring more than 300 objects from over 40 public and private collections, the exhibit traces the movement through landmark buildings as well as furniture, fashion, sculpture, advertisements, industrial design, graphic illustrations, and everyday objects like coins. Many are shown publicly for the first time.
For Dy, Art Deco has been a passion for decades. Having spent years documenting Art Deco buildings around the country before co-publishing the book “Deco Filipino” with Gerard Lico, the historian first pitched the idea to the National Museum in 2023.
“Since we were nearing the centennial of the Art Deco design movement, the idea was to tell the story of Art Deco in Filipino life,” Dy says. “Specifically within that period where Art Deco flourished in different parts of our islands.”
The curatorial process wasn’t easy either, as the team sourced objects from then Art Deco hotspots in Metro Manila, Quezon, Pampanga, and Negros Occidental as well as provinces such as Ilocos, Cavite, Tarlac, Batangas, and Rizal.
Local motifs, local woods
In the Philippines, Art Deco evolved stylistically, adapting Western design for the local vernacular after the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris reached our shores.
At first, it began with classical motifs, “stylized geometric shapes,” says Dado. “In terms of architecture… you have the zigzags, the ziggurats, and certain decorative features in the reliefs.” There are also sunbursts, shells, and floral patterns.
Later, in the 1930s, it moved to the Streamline-Moderne variant with sleek lines and aerodynamic shapes that emphasized machine-age optimism (Keep an eye out for the model of Generoso Villanueva’s Bacolod mansion that encapsulates the style). Dado notes how Filipino artisans were quick to transform it, incorporating solihiya into furniture, woven into patterns on piña, or drawing from native flora and fauna.
Rosales further explains, “What makes the pieces in our show Filipino is that they’ve been adapted with local motifs and using local woods.” He points to a chair fashioned after the sleek silhouette of a steamship, but with solihiya backing suited for the tropical climate. Nearby is his favorite piece, a furniture suite carved with undulating flora, made by Gonzalo Puyat for a Sariaya, Quezon residence designed by Art Deco architect Andres Luna de San Pedro.
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Throughout the exhibition are also original French decorative objects, displayed alongside Philippine works to show how ideas crossed oceans.
Designing a world
Walking through the hallowed halls of the museum, it’s clear the curators designed the environment around the objects, too. The looming pillars were created just for the show—incorporating designs by Tomas Mapua, the first registered architect of the Philippines. There are even elaborate iron grills that frame the galleries like doors and windows.
Old songs also echo through the rooms. “We wanted to layer with the music,” Rosales says. “To give a totality of the period and make people really feel it as you walk through. And also challenge the usual way that the museum styles their rooms, really pushing it forward with the display.”
De Asis adds that the National Museum is aiming to “shift to more narrative-driven curatorial work… Before, it was the objects that drove the curatorial narrative. This one is a shift from that past practice.”
After moving through the carefully recreated galleries, the glamour of Art Deco begins to fade. Peering at the past from the present exhibit, visions of the Jazz Age and Great Gatsby illusions dissipate.
Art Deco innovator and crystal designer René Lalique once said, “To seek beauty is a more worthy aim than to display luxury.” And while transportative, this exhibit strips back the fanfare and fantasy, grounding it in the Philippine people’s rituals of everyday life, beautiful as they were.
“Art Deco: Modernity and Design in the Philippines 1925–1950” runs until Oct. 25, 2026, at Galleries VII and X, 2/F of the National Museum of Fine Arts, P. Padre Burgos Ave., Ermita, Manila