I hate art cars! When I was younger I remember there was a series of BMWs that were painted by artists. I remember thinking that if I had that car I would take all that crap off and repaint it. I like to see what a designer and engineer and a company put out. They go, here’s our best product, here’s the colour we think it looks best in. That’s what I like.
Yet I like art very much. I can’t imagine going into an art gallery and seeing an Andy Warhol painting and saying, I’m going to draw a Jaguar or a picture of a Mercedes on that. People would hit the roof. To me the two do not go together. At all.
I’ve never seen an art car that looked better after the artist had finished with it. It always looked worse to me because they don’t follow the lines of the vehicle and they don’t have any respect for the design of the car. Consequently any sort of depth perception that you get from the way the fender rolls in or out is completely lost because the artist is just painting on a car, he’s not taking the designer’s vision or the aerodynamics into account. But that’s me. When I sit down to eat, I don’t want my mashed potatoes touching my steak, touching my peas. I keep them all separate. I’m the same way with my car. A picture of Marilyn Monroe’s face going down the road at 70mph does nothing for me.
My favourite cars are one man’s vision – WO Bentley, Duesenberg – one man’s interpretation of what it is. When I look at art, I like to look at one artist’s idea of what they do.
I think the closest you would have a car designer and artist come together would probably be Voisin. He was an artist, he was an engineer, he was a designer and his cars look like nothing else out there. His cars are as close to Salvador Dali going down the road as you could get. They’re not particularly symmetrical, they look oddly different, yet they function as an automobile and everything in the car has a purpose. The roll-back roof of one of those Voisins is a fascinating thing to watch.
I also think of Buckminster Fuller, who designed the Dymaxion. That’s art and engineering. And Bill Stout, with the Stout Scarab, although he was more of an airplane engineer, made something that is stunningly beautiful and art deco. I wouldn’t want to see Andy Warhol take Bill Stout’s Scarab and paint it. It just clashes. They don’t have the same vision. They don’t go together.
I think what Peter Stevens, the McLaren F1 designer, does is art. And if you look at the shift link of a McLaren, that looks like art to me, the way everything interconnects and the way it moves.
Like the choices an artist makes from his palette, the colour of a car is so important to the mood and feel of it. I was a bit taken aback when I saw the new Jaguar XKR-S in French Blue. I immediately thought: no. That’s wrong. Jaguars are not this colour. Then I used it for a week. And it grew on me. The bright blue accentuates the lines of the car nicely. Two years ago, when I was at the Aston Martin factory and we saw the One-77, they worked very hard to get the perfect colour. A sort of a steel-bluish colour. People spent hours looking at it to see how the sunlight flowed over the fenders. The artists and designers work very hard to get what they feel is the perfect look for this car, and people spend hours doing that to the interiors too. Should this bezel be chrome? Brushed aluminium?
There’s a reason body designers ask for the body of the car in white. It’s an absence of colour and, if it looks good in white, you’ve got yourself a good-looking car. The number of XK120 Jags I see that are white always amazes me; mine is white, it’s one of the few cars that look good in that colour. When I see a Toyota Camry or something in white, it looks like an appliance.
The cars I have which I regard as pieces of art are the Lancia Aurelia, the Tatra, the Cord, the Jag XK120 coupé and any Bugatti. But getting cars regarded as art is still a fight. I was just up at the Portland Museum of Art and, kicking and screaming, they brought in about 18 cars on display. There was a lot of animosity towards the idea but it turned out to be their biggest attendance ever. People were taken aback by viewing cars as art. A lot of the old-school people thought it was an awful idea but people really flocked to it.
It’s nice to see the automobile being appreciated as art. A Ferrari just went at auction for .4 million. That’s a crazy amount of money, but then a little Monet or painting that hangs on the wall goes for 0 million. Wouldn’t you rather have one you could use, and drive around?
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