Hasta La Ideas

The collapse of the US auto industry stands as one of the national tragedies of this generation, but it also provides boundless opportunities for ironic reflection when looking through a book like Heimann and Patton’s Classic Cars. The first time we opened their book of historic auto ads, it revealed a blue ’67 Olds Toronodo, complete with a matador against a red background, framed against the caption, “After you’ve walked off with all the honors, what do you do for an encore?” Regrettably we’ve found out. The copy on the back of this coffee table books contrasts the Stone Age and the Bronze Age with the 20th Century — The Automobile Age. The 20th Century has come to a close, and there’s little doubt that the age of the automobile is at an end as well. That said, a hundred year retrospective on any human endeavor reflects not only on the products produced, but upon the values and the cultures that produced them.

So while Classic Cars is first and foremost a record of the graphic design that accompanied one of the first mass-produced assembly line products of all time, it also stands as a visual history of the industrial design of the 20th Century … and all of its attendant successes and missteps. Heimann covers pop culture for Taschen and Patton writes about automobile design for The New York Times, so their catalog of auto ads not only covers the classics like the Jaguar XK-E or the ’66 Mustang, but also cars like the Paige and the Lozier which exist now only in the air conditioned garages of white haired men who fancy themselves collectors. I couldn’t find some classic early automobiles like the Duesenberg J (one apocryphal origin of the term “what a doozy”) in their book, but perhaps that’s because the advertising medium barely applied to cars, or to the social class that could afford them, at that time. The advertisements themselves stand on their own merit. Most of the early ads are hand painted, a lost rendering art these days, and echo the Art Nouveau posters of Alphonse Mucha. Whether ignoring the naive copy meant to solicit purchase or not, those early ads have an artistic sensibility that stands on it’s own merit. While the written copy itself often confounds the rules of the grid, the earnest tone of the words hearkens back to an era where a ownership of a car was tantamount to success and we didn’t even know cigarettes were lethal.

(more…)