It all started with Edades
On assignment in 1973 from a multinational consumer goods company to interview women in Davao City regarding their washing habits and practices, Cid Reyes had a lucky rendezvous with history, a meeting that still reverberates to this day.
It was unplanned, but the stars aligned for him to meet Victorio Edades, the father of modernism in Philippine art in his home.
Prodded by Manuel Duldulao and his desire to interview Filipino artists then (and now), Reyes was at a market late afternoon and took a leap of faith by looking for Edades’ home. By a stroke of luck, the driver of the tricycle he was riding knew where it was.
Another surprise: Upon arriving at the house and with a cassette tape recorder, he was allowed by the Edades couple to enter and interview the great Victorio in a “long engaging conversation.” He even came back the next day to continue the interview with the master.
That conversation with Edades was the start of Reyes’ series of interviews with the masters of Philippine art, now uploaded online through the ArticulatePH Youtube page.
“Imagine, a tricycle driver changed the direction of Philippine art,” quips Reyes in a recent interview with Lifestyle.
First in Asia
Reyes, who was behind the successful ad campaign “Labadami, Labango” of a laundry detergent in the 1990s, later on interviewed other Filipino masters and contemporary greats who all made a mark in the history and development of Philippine art.
His talk with Edades was serendipitous as, apart from being his first interviewee, Edades was also considered the progenitor of modern art in the country.
Upon his return to the Philippines in 1928 from his studies in the United States, Edades championed the cause of modernism, making the country the first in Southeast Asia to embrace and practice modernist art.
Reyes said that Japan followed a decade after, then later India, Thailand, China, and South Korea.
In 1937, Edades, with Galo Ocampo and Diosdado Lorenzo, organized the Atelier of Modern Art, which led to the creation of the Thirteen Moderns, a group of then emerging modernists.
Struggle and success
Reyes’ interview of Edades offers a firsthand account of the power struggle then between the traditional and modernist forms of art. The artist recalled that when he arrived back in 1928, they were mocked, condemned, and “almost called idiots” as “they all said that we didn’t know how to draw.”
However, later on, modernism in art was eventually accepted, and today it goes hand in hand with other visual art forms.
Reyes’ interviews provide vignettes and previously unknown details on the life and art-making of these masters.
Edades, for instance, revealed that while he was a student (bachelor’s and master’s degrees) in Washington State for nine years, he had to work intermittently in Alaska as a salmon canner to provide for his needs.
In Manila, for two years, he worked at the Bureau of Public Works under the famed architect Juan Arellano sometime in the 1930s, doing perspective work on the bureau’s projects. By evening, he would teach History of Architecture at the Mapua Institute of Technology.
Collaboration
In 1936, he collaborated with Carlos “Botong” Francisco and Ocampo on a mural at the foyer of State Theater on Avenida Rizal in Manila’s Sta. Cruz district.
That mural, titled “Rising Philippines,” was a symbolic work on the progress of the country as contributed by its indigenous population as well as the Spaniards and the Americans.
Unfortunately, the building, designed by Juan Nakpil, was bombed during the liberation of Manila in 1945, damaging the structure and destroying the mural.
As an artist, one of Edades’ major works is “The Builders,” done in 1928 and now part of the collection of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
In the interview, Edades said he “put my soul in that” work, which he associates with farmers and workers, jobs that were close to him as he grew up in a farming community in Pangasinan.
“I showed my emotion, my feeling of sympathy for the workers, and at the same time, showing that there is beauty in work,” he said, adding “there is beauty in all of their actions.”
These are just a few of the details to discover in the interviews that Reyes has been doing for 52 years now and counting—from what he described as his “jeprox look” days in the 1970s.
