Auto Show Stars : Car Designers Are Honored by Art World
DETROIT — One hundred years ago, when Karl Benz’s first automobile hit the road in Germany, Detroit was still just a modest little town, led by thrifty businessmen with few aspirations to national prominence.
But not for long. Soon after the turn of the century, Detroit began its domination of the world’s automotive business that was unchallenged until the 1970s.
During much of that period, Detroit rightly claimed its title as the Motor City, not only because of its immense industrial might but also because of its pace-setting automotive styling.
Today, Tokyo may be threatening to take that title away, but the memories of Detroit’s best times linger on.
Birth of the Car
Now, in an exhibit that coincides with this year’s 100th anniversary of the birth of the car, the Detroit Institute of Arts is celebrating the Motor City’s golden years through what is being billed as a comprehensive look back at Detroit-style automotive design as a native American art form.
Detroit’s premiere art museum has taken the “Automobile and Culture” exhibit, on display during last summer’s Olympic Arts Festival at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and has given it a distinctive Detroit twist by adding a whole new section devoted entirely to the works of a few automotive designers who determined what American cars looked like between 1925 and 1950.
Unabashedly, the exhibit--which opened earlier this month and runs until Sept. 8--excludes all imports in order to capitalize on the hometown angle for the museum, which is also marking its 100th birthday this year.
While the Olympic exhibit focused on the car as the subject of art, as well as on the automobile’s influence on American art and culture, the Detroit show is the first major art museum exhibit ever to attempt an in-depth study of Detroit’s car designers as artists in their own right and to try to show how their artwork--U.S.-built passenger cars--evolved.
“In L.A., the exhibit presented a look at the car and its influence on society, but ours is more of a retrospective on industrial design in the glory days of Detroit,” says Davira Taragin, curator of the exhibit, “Automobile and Culture, Detroit Style.”
Much Preserved
Although much of the original Olympic exhibit has been preserved, the stars of the Detroit show are clearly the individual designers who toiled in virtual anonymity in Detroit’s back shops during the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s and early ‘50s to turn out some of the most original automotive designs ever produced.
It was a period that saw automotive styling come into its own, well before management complacency and gas lines diminished Detroit’s art.
While the cars produced during that era have long been admired for their beauty, the designers themselves have seldom before received their due from the art world.
To make up for that, the exhibit profiles the works of key designers such as Harley Earl, who founded GM’s styling studio in the 1920s and went on to influence all of GM’s cars until the late 1950s; William Mitchell, Earl’s protege and successor who designed everything from Cadillac luxury sedans to Corvettes, and Carl Breer, the Chrysler designer who developed the avant-garde 1934 Chrysler Airflow, which flopped in the showrooms but still helped to determine the direction of automotive design over the next two decades.
But as the exhibit explains, their art developed, like everything else in the auto industry, in response to economics.
As the reliability and performance of American cars improved during the 1920s, consumers started to worry less about what was under the hood than about what the hood and the rest of the outer body looked like.
New Emphasis
When General Motors in the early 1920s placed a new emphasis on the styling of its Chevrolets and succeeded in taking business away from the dependable but drab Ford Model T, the connection between styling and profits was secured.
Soon, all of the auto companies were hiring artists and architects to come up with stylish exteriors that would fit in with the fashions of the day. And, eventually, exterior styling became the only aspect of the American car that was sure to differ from year to year, reflecting the changing tastes and moods of the nation.
Beginning with a chrome-covered, mint-condition 1929 Duesenberg and ending with a stern, 1949 Ford Tudor Sedan, the museum is showcasing a dozen cars that are classic representatives of each important trend in the 25-year span from 1925 to 1950 covered by the exhibit.
They are arranged in a way that shows how automotive design quickly evolved from the playful Art Deco styling of the 1920s to the rounded edges and the early attempts at modern aerodynamic design of the late 1940s.
Also on display are the early drawings and models of many of the cars to show how each designer’s work evolved from the styles of earlier years.
An in-depth museum study of the work of Detroit’s automotive designers has never been conducted before in part because they were never considered artists, even by the auto companies, according to Taragin. They worked in teams in a secretive, corporate climate (as they still do today), and most of their prototype sketches and clay models were thrown out as soon as the final product was put on the assembly line.
No Records Kept
Taragin found to her dismay that none of the major auto companies kept records of their most famous early designs; with help from the museum’s panel of consulting designers, she had to spend two years hunting through the private collections of retired auto stylists to find prototype drawings that might shed light on how the thinking behind the early automotive designs evolved.
Now, she hopes the Detroit exhibit will finally raise the status of the car stylist to that of the pop artist.
“In our exhibit, we are talking about the development of an art form and we try to analyze it in the same way a museum might analyze the development of furniture design,” Taragin said. “We are trying to show the parallels between what was going on in automotive design and what was happening at the same time in the decorative arts.”
