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In the Fifties, the world first glimpsed how life as
we knew it might end. The nuclear weapons testing that
was then going on unabated produced monstrously-shaped
plants, horribly deformed animals and sickened humans
irradiated near testing sites in Nevada and the Pacific.
At the time, people feared that if the pace of superpower
rivalry between America and the Soviet Union continued,
the world would indeed end in a nuclear apocalypse, leaving
only mutated life-forms to survive and feast on humanity.
Sci-fi fantasy films about radiation strengthened mutant
monsters wreaking havoc on civilization became avidly
patronized by the public, such as the Japanese cult classic
Gojira/Godzilla, and the now less-remembered
Hollywood B-movie, The Beginning of the End.
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One Filipino managed to channel
this fear of tomorrow into a compellingly modern motif
that would result not in human catastrophe, but in aesthetic
success. Hernando Ruiz Ocampo (1911-1978), posthumously
declared National Artist in 1991, was a novelist/co-founder
of the influential Veronicans, and editor of the Sunday
Chronicle Magazine. A committed nationalist, he depicted
the conditions of the poor and downtrodden in numerous
short stories and essays. His nationalist views would
influence him as he expanded his artistry from letters
to painting starting in the mid-1930s, using a social
realist theme with art deco-style cubistic divisions that
persuaded Victorio Edades to claim him as one of the Thirteen
Filipino Moderns in 1939. After the war, his sensitive
appraisal of the nuclear arms race and its effects upon
popular culture dovetailed with his ambition to produce
a truly indigenous modern art style that did not depend
on artistic motifs imported from New York.
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