PBA Galleries

• Robert Fan, Architect and Director of Design. “Chinese Interior Decoration” (Cathay Decorative Art Studio, Shanghai, China, ca. 1935) 12pp. in original decorative wrappers. Illustrated with 1 color plate of a decorative ceiling panel tipped to first page, and with 25+ photographs, mostly of other design panels, and 6 pictures of Fan’s actual design of a reception hall, library, auditorium and “modern theatre”. 
• SatoGlass [English cover title] Medetaya & Co., Tokyo. Catalogue of Japanese Art Deco glass design, undated, circa 1935. Japanese text except for English titles of the company and its product, and an English sign touting the company’s “peculiar art” and “novel design” 9 x 12”, 48pp., almost entirely photographic illustrations. Spiral bound in stiff green and red wrappers.

Both imprints are rare. Of the Chinese catalogue, WorldCat locates only one institutional copy in the US and one in Canada. The Japanese catalogue may be the only existing copy as neither Google nor the Japanese Diet Library in Tokyo shows any listing for either the Medetaya Company or “Sato-Glass”.

Robert Fan, or Fan Wenzhao, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was the leading Shanghai architect of the 1930s Art Deco movement. He designed the Nanking Theater (now the Shanghai Concert Hall) and the Shanghai YMCA as well as movie theaters, private homes and apartment buildings, using modernist western lines of Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Moderne styles. After the Communist victory of 1949, he moved to Hong Kong and eventually to the US, where his children became San Francisco architects. The Japanese catalogue shows beautiful Art Deco designs of glass panels (some scaling entire rooms), large screens, vases, drinking glasses, light fixtures, clocks and mirrors. There is also one page picturing the artists and designers at work.