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The Philippines’ most significant private museum Lito B. Zulueta Philippine Daily Inquirer
February 15, 2010
MARKING ITS 50TH ANniversary this year, the Lopez Memorial Museum remains the foremost private museum and historical research resource in the country, with an unparalleled collection of Philippine art, mostly of the Old and Modern Masters, and rare books, including Philippine incunabula, or books printed during the first 50 years of the invention of printing in the country in 1593.
Its collection of Philippine-related titles published in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries is comprehensive, and its periodicals and popular printed materials such as newspapers and magazines, particularly in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, is perhaps the most extensive and best-preserved among collections in public and private hands. This was consolidated by its acquisition of the library of the old Manila Times, which has the most extensive collection of newspapers from the American colonial period onward. Its image bank, reinforced by its acquisition of the rich Manila Times photo library and the archives of LVN Films, is not only a visual delight but a ticket to being transported back to history.
Without a doubt, outside of the key private university museums and libraries, the Lopez Museum is the most frequented and consulted by historians and researchers from here and abroad. It is a veritable cultural center, an intellectual locus, a haven for the mind and the soul.
Visionary industrialist
The museum is the legacy of Don Eugenio Lopez Sr. If he had not established the museum and library, Lopez would still be remembered as arguably the greatest and most visionary of Filipino industrialists.
Starting from sugar holdings in Iloilo, Lopez went from strength to strength and made the family business the most diversified in the land—from transportation (he founded the first air service in Asia) to telecommunications (ABS-CBN), publishing (El Tiempo and Manila Chronicle) and education (Feati).
In 1962, Lopez acquired Meralco from the Americans, increased its power-generating capacity five times, and showed that Filipinos could run things even better than the Americans. He later endowed $1 million to Harvard University (a very big donation at a time when the parity between the peso and the dollar was one-to-one) and gave the principal donation that established the Asian Institute of Management, bold and sweeping gestures to embody and reinforce his conviction that as far as global business and management are concerned, the Filipino can.
Together with his brother, Vice-President Fernando Lopez (1904-1993), Eugenio Lopez Sr. led the postwar rise of the Philippines as an international political player and an Asian economic powerhouse. All of this was dashed when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972 and, in the guise of dismantling the oligarchy, grabbed the Lopez empire.
Perhaps it is because of Marcos’s ringing rhetoric against the oligarchy that Filipinos up to now seem to have mixed feelings about the injustice committed to the Lopez empire: There’s not even a Wikipedia entry to summarize the life of Lopez, whose business intrepidity could make mincemeat of the taipans and other pretenders among the so-called captains of industry.
Imelda Marcos and Juan Ponce Enrile may continue to weave fictions about how Lopez allegedly turned over his holdings to the strongman voluntarily, and it is perhaps their capacity for spell-binding tales and contortionist logic that the public and even the judiciary find the weavings convincing. But the authentic national conscience knows better: The Lopez empire was a steal for the Marcos kleptocracy.
If one considered that intrinsic to Lopez’s vision was his strong sense of history, then one could better appreciate the determining role of culture in forming and informing the drive of history. Empires rise and fall on the foundations of cultural history. Even if the Lopez conglomerate is now a rational size of its old self, it remains a shining example of how a sense of history and a sound regard of culture could drive the engine of business toward a destiny that not only delivers a healthy RORB, but also helps animate society and brings the best out of its people. No marketing gimmickry can disguise the poverty of social vision among today’s corporations despite their pretensions at “corporate social responsibility.” All social responsibility starts with social solidarity that can only be cultivated by a sense of culture and history.
From Lancaster Street to Meralco Avenue
That sense is embodied in the Lopez Museum. From its birth in 1960 in the Angel Nakpil-designed modern building on Lancaster Street in Pasay City, to its present location at Benpres Building on Meralco Avenue in Pasig, the museum has always stood as a conserver of culture and a guardian of history. Many writers, artists, scholars and teachers have charted their intellectual growth along with the rhythms and fortunes of the Lopez Museum. While he was a Catholic school student in Pasay City in the 1970s and early 1980s, this writer remembers checking on the museum at Lancaster regularly and falling into an awed hush whenever coming into contact with the old periodicals and books, the Christian virgins of Hidalgo exposed to the leery and lecherous men of Rome, and the women of Luna pointing to a joint bright future for “España y Filipinas.” Then, when he was a rookie reporter of the Chronicle at Benpres in the late 1980s, the years of living dangerously amid the coups and abortive power attempts, he found the best of times at the Lopez Museum.
One wishes that even in the era of the multimedia and amid the collective historical memory ever truncating, the newer generations would have the reason to go to the Lopez Museum. Of course, the challenge for all museums and libraries today is relevance. How could Lopez Museum compete with “Wowowee” and “Eat Bulaga,” whose live studio audience are filled with public school students and teachers ostensibly on an “educational tour?” How could it and the other museums compete with SM malls, where the students and teachers flock to after their “educational tour” of “Wowowee” and “Eat Bulaga?”
Fed on a steady diet of inanity by television infotainment from the two giant television networks (one of them managed by Marcos cronies, another owned and managed by the Lopezes themselves, and a further third network run on cash fueled by texting and wrong spelling), and feeding further on junk food, spiritually and literally, by malls and other cathedrals of crass commerce, young Filipinos have become Homer’s Lotus eaters, a people who feed on the lotus of forgetfulness, slide down to cultural anonymity and historical oblivion, and become the zombies of the new millennium, utterly soulless and irredeemably hopeless.
But perhaps in the next 50 years, the Lopez Museum and other cultural centers like it would continue to thrive and forge ahead with its difficult mission against all odds. Then, the future for this nation does not look so hopeless after all.
