1959 Ford Galaxie

Throughout the 1950s, car designers in Detroit stretched and expanded their vehicles in all dimensions while applying ever more extravagant chrome decoration.  Every piece of trim and every bodywork moulding was designed to emphasise the sense of horizontality. This brochure depended on the talents of illustrators to bring the car to life and inspire some excitement in the reader.  Photography still had its limitations - an accomplished illustrator could subtly glamourise the product with discreet exaggeration and an imaginative way with colour.  A wedding theme runs through the imagery and we see the menfolk drool over the external finish while the women are swooning over the spacious interior.  There’s a touch of Hollywood about the wide-screen visualisation that places the viewer inside the vehicle while the ethereal bridesmaids dance in attendance.  Detroit was a city of ad agencies that specialised in serving the auto industry and the illustrators they engaged would often go on to stellar careers elsewhere, armed with the depth of their experience in keeping one step ahead of the camera with their transcendent visions of automobile perfection. By launching the car as the Galaxie, Ford was capitalising on public interest in the space race - galactic space is the infinity of space. The name survived for 15 years until it was retired in 1974. 1959 Ford models would go on to win a gold medal at the Brussels World Fair for styling elegance - an unusual accolade for Detroit industry.

 

Transparent Factory, Dresden

Dresden's Transparent Factory (Die Gläserne Manufaktur) was built in 2002 for Volkswagen to a design by Gunter Henn, just less than a mile from the city centre in a corner of the Großer Garten at Straßburger Platz. Not strictly a factory, more of an assembly plant. No foundry, no metal bashing, no casting or forging. All the heavy work takes place 80 miles away in the city of Zwickau where VW inherited the former Trabant factory after the demise of the DDR. Vehicle components and chassis are shipped to a logistics centre in Dresden and onwards by a 150 ton CarGoTram that runs on the city’s tram network.

The principle assembly building extends along Stübelallee where a handful of workers, clad in white lab-coats, can be observed supervising the automated production line. For several years the VW Phaeton was “hand-built” on the premises but since 2017 production has moved to the e-Golf, VW’s first all electric vehicle. Rather than being conceived to take advantage of economies of scale, this factory seems like a vanity project, intended to generate publicity through high visibility and to function as a statement of faith in the commercial potential of the old DDR territory. A Visitor Centre and a Restaurant are provided to attract the curious to step inside. The great glass rotunda where finished vehicles are temporarily stacked certainly succeeds as a spectacle and the operation offers a brightly lit window into the workings of the motor industry. But the extent to which it’s profitable is for others to calculate.

Snow on the Road

A North American winter is not to be taken lightly – weather bombs and snowmageddon are routine events. Especially in the North East and Midwest where massive snowfalls are reported every year with breathless excitement. Digging the driveway out of waist high snow was a common task, often shared with the family as shown here. These ads from 1930 to 1965 show Madison Avenue promoting the virtues of winter-proofed cars to an audience that needed no reminder of the perils of driving in snow and ice. Sporty associations were most favoured with the majority of cars pictured against a backdrop of winter sports – a ski resort is just about the last place where the affluent will be reminded of the existence of the lower orders. The merits of such refinements as triple-turbine transmission, a Super Jetfire Engine, a Vibra-Tuned Ride and swivel hipped handling are extolled in the text. For the reader with a strong stomach the final ad (Goodbye Mr Winter) is an egregious example of the art of the copywriter at its most long winded.

Chevrolet 1957 – sweet, smooth and sassy

1957 was a big year for Chevrolet. As America prospered, motor styling became increasingly rapturous – a ballistic missile/jukebox aesthetic was evolving fast and would soon achieve its apotheosis. The ’57 Chevy is still one of the most highly regarded classic cars and the most cherished model is the Bel Air (below). Massive advertising campaigns were essential to drive demand for the annual face-lifts and Chevrolet business was handled by the Detroit based agency, Campbell-Ewald. In general I feel no great affection for motor cars but the feverish insanity of 1950’s Detroit overcomes my resistance. I’m old enough to recall what boring things English cars were in this period – styled like Victorian sideboards and marketed by association with upper-class snobbery – shown against an endless backdrop of fox-hunting, stately homes, golf courses, debutantes’ balls, Dickensian coaching inns and cocktail parties with uniformed flunkeys in attendance. 

The Campbell-Ewald approach is much more to my liking – a cheerfully assertive message that you’ll miss out on something wonderful, exciting and life-enhancing if you don’t trade up to the very latest model with the unspoken message that nothing spells failure more clearly than being seen in last year’s model. Illustrators still got more work than photographers and dramatically exaggerated the dimensions and detailing on the vehicles into ecstatic visions designed to leap off the page and arouse the motorist’s deepest desires for status, speed and comfort. The advertising tag-line of the year was the alliterative “sweet, smooth and sassy” – sweet to taste, smooth to the touch plus a gentle nudge towards the erogenous zones. How else to describe the Triple-Turbine Turboglide? A second tag-line from 1957 was “velvet smooth and full of spunk” leaving even less to the imagination. I shudder to think what a British audience would have made of language like this. This selection features the work of the following illustrators, Alex Ross(2), Stan Galli, Bruce Bomberger(2), David Lindsay, Charles Allen and Paul Nonnast. 

Pontiac on Parade

From 1959 to 1971 Van Kaufman (VK) and Art Fitzpatrick (AF) worked as a collaborative partnership, illustrating exclusively for Pontiac Motors. Fitzpatrick had previously been employed as an automotive designer while Kaufman had worked in the Disney Studio as an animator and background artist. Illustrators are often solitary creatures and this level of cooperation is very unusual but both Kaufman and Fitzpatrick had prior experience of collaborative workplaces. The division of labour meant that Fitzpatrick illustrated the vehicles while Kaufman painted the backgrounds. 

This was a late flowering of the art of the illustrator – by 1959 most car advertisers favoured the photographic image but the VK-AF team brought an unequalled wealth of surface detail combined with an intoxicating richness of colour. The cars appeared longer and wider than ever - the paintwork dazzled and the chrome sparkled with transcendent brilliance. Unlike some other manufacturers, Pontiac advertising had never been aimed directly at the blue-collar readership by locating the car in everyday surroundings – the school run, the shopping trip, the drive-in, the gas station, the toll booth. But in the 1960s they cultivated an air of status and exclusivity with exotic overseas locations, grand mansions and the pursuits of the high earners all expressed in super-saturated, high contrast colour palettes. Kaufman employed a variety of styles for his landscapes and cityscapes from hyper-realism, through impressionism to a more contemporary, gestural finish but the cars were invariably immaculate and sublime, almost always presented in a position of rest to be admired for their sculptural qualities. This is a small selection from their prodigious output, claimed by some to be more than 700 in all. There’s a vast archive to be seen at Pontiacsonline.