Fabio Filippini investigates the history of the automobile, as featured in fine arts

*The various facets of the automobile in the arts ( photo © Fabio Filippini)*

It is said that beautiful cars are works of art. At the same time, the adjective ‘artistic’ is often used to describe creative disciplines that rely on drawing or sculpting skills - such as car design. Despite those terms being frequently abused in today’s popular culture, and almost everyone - from cooks to social media photographers - being able pretend to be an ‘artist’, there certainly is true artistic value to some of the best-designed cars in automotive history. Moreover, it is well-known that the boundaries between design and art have become completely blurred over the last 50 years. Classifications therefore cannot remain totally strict anymore.

Accepting this common ground, albeit without engaging in a complex debate between the different disciplines, I would like to focus on the relation between Car Design and Art.

This relationship between car design and art involves a significant caveat, however: many car designers tend to associate artistic value mostly with the ability to draw or paint (even if one’s canvas happens to be a Wacom tablet). This view is informed by a pseudo-romantic vision dating back to the art word of the 19th century. Moreover, there are many car-related painters around (some very good ones, but also many more whose talents are mediocre or just plain poor), who are described as ‘car artist’… but that’s not the sort of art I am talking about here. I am not referring to futuristic design illustrations (Syd Mead’s, for instance) either, nor art-related marketing operations, such as the brilliant BMW Art Cars from the mid ‘70s, or other similar projects associating contemporary artists with cars. In fact, what I’d like to discuss is the exact opposite arrangement: the car in the context of the arts. Those instances when the automobile becomes a subject of modern or contemporary art - the type of fine art you would see at international museums or contemporary galleries in New York, Paris or Hong Kong, to put bluntly.

For obvious reasons, cars couldn’t appear in any artwork earlier then by the end of the 19th century, since they didn’t exist before… unless one considers Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing for a self-moving chariot in 1478, of course.

Having said that, over the past century or so, cars have regularly been featured as subject of works of modern and contemporary art. Since 1909 at the latest, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti sang praises of cars in his Manifesto del Futurismo, artists have come to engage with the automobile in the most unimaginable ways. In 1951, the MoMA of New York presented the first exhibition of cars at a modern art museum: 8 Automobiles, curated by Philip Johnson, which included a 1951 Willys-Overland M-38 Jeep, a 1928 Mercedes Benz SS Tourer, a 1948 MG TC, a Bentley saloon from 1939, a 1937 Talbot-Lago teardrop coupé, a 1941 Lincoln Continental coupé, the Gordon Buehrig-designed 1937 Cord 812, and the most advanced and beautiful one of all: the 1947 Cisitalia 202 Berlinetta Coupé by Pininfarina, which later became part of MoMA’s permanent collection.

Since the first three decades of the 20th century, when early paintings of Futurist artists like Boccioni, Balla, Russolo were created, the amount of artwork related to cars rapidly expanded, involving artists such as César, who compressed a Renault Dauphine in 1959, Andy Warhol with his Car Crash paintings from 1963, or Italian-American, Salvatore Scarpitta, who worked on racing cars since the mid-sixties. In this context, special mention goes to Chris Burden, who in a 1974 performance, named Transfixed, had himself crucified (literally!) on the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle and then briefly driven around the neighbourhood. He continued concerning himself with the automobile with a 1977 project called B-Car, a lightweight, functioning, four-wheeled vehicle, followed later by many installations of machinery and dystopian urban visions involving cars, before concluding with Porsche with Meteorite in 2013. This installation involved a bright yellow Porsche 914, suspended at one end of a telescoping beam, and a small, 365-pound meteorite hanging on the other, achieving a perfect weight balance between them. In the late ‘80s, US artist, Richard Prince, started his Hoods series by casting and painting bonnets, air scoops and other body parts from ‘60s American muscle cars, which obtained the look of minimalist sculptures or, in other cases, the appearance of some sort of unfinished sarcophagus to the glory of automotive mythology. In 1993, Bertrand Lavier presented Giulietta (in fact a badly wrecked Alfetta GT), whereas Mexican artist, Gabriel Orozco created La DS, now on display at the MoMA: an actual Citroën DS ‘slimmed down’ by a third. In the mid-nineties, Alain Bublex, a former car designer at Renault, in search of utopian visions somewhere between the past and the future, designed a series of weird little aerodynamic vehicles, named Aerofiat. These were created by transforming a poor Fiat 126 into some sort of experimental prototype. In 2001, Erwin Wurm started his uncannily obese Fat Cars series, while Dutch artist, Joost Conijn, created Hout Auto, a plywood car based on a Citroën DS, albeit with a wood-burning steam engine installed, which he drove through fifteen European countries, collecting wood along the way to fuel the car. This list could go on until today, probably well into the fast-growing field of the global NFT crypto-art business.

As I was writing these lines, a fundamental question arose: when did a car appear in an official artwork for the first time? I could only remember two paintings from 1904, Pelizza da Volpedo’s Auto al Penice and Umberto Boccioni Auto in Corsa, and, eventually, an even earlier litograph by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: l'Automobiliste, dating between 1896 and 1898, which depicts a driver dressed in a fur coat, rather than the car. As a consequence of this uncertainty, I decided to check with the most reliable source I know, with regards to mastering car design and art history at the same time and on the same level: Milen Milenovich, himself a very experienced car designer.

The result of my request was immediate and interesting, and shall therefore be presented using Milen’s own words: «I don’t know anything older than the Lautrec (mentioned above), anyway, by 1901, as the car became more visible in society, so it started to appear more frequently in art. As the car was invented in Europe, and in context a plaything of the rich, it appeared in European salon painting, a painting of ‘you in your motor car’ cemented your status. Two excellent examples from 1901 are: Les Dames Goldschmidt au Bois de Boulogne en 1897 sur une voiturette Peugeot painted by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, and Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu in a Motor Car by Ramon Casas. But both paintings show the car, effectively, as a prop. The beauty of the car was the kinetic element, motion, speed; and these don’t depict that aspect. That’s where the beauty of the Futurists: Russolo, Balla, etc. really showed the true, unique facet of the car in art. For me those paintings from around 1911-2 are the true pioneers of the automobile in art. The starting point. Everything before is just anecdotal. But there’s one more thing I must leave you with...

In 1898, Aimé Jules Dalou was commissioned to make a monument commemorating the victory of Levassor in the first car race, in 1895. He died before the monument was done and it was completed in 1907 by his student Camille Lefèvre. It is still visible, kind of lost among the traffic jams at Porte Maillot in Paris.

The monument to Levassor, with the sort of surprising 1890’s version of the ‘uncanny valley’, trying to depict a warm, shaking, snarling, firing object in cold stone and finally getting it right with the futurists, are for me the two steps that were fundamental.»

At the end of this story, there is one more recent experience that I should mention, as it involves me directly and has been mentioned very rarely: the Pininfarina Cambiano Concept, presented at Geneva Motorshow in 2012, was probably the first car integrating a piece of contemporary video art into its interior. I imagined the ultimate luxury experience, by having a series of art videos specifically realised by Spanish-Belgian artist, Javier Fernandez, which were projected onto the interior roof, hence creating an ever-changing ambience of sights and sounds for the passengers. It was shown briefly at the car’s unveiling, but the spotlights of the show, projecting their powerful light through the semi-transparent roof, were rendering the video almost imperceptible for the passengers… I guess that ever since then, on the many other occasions when the prototype was on display, nobody ever turned on the projector to show those videos again.