The oldest automobile brand after Buick, Cadillac has always occupied a place at the top of the luxury market in the United States. Conflating flight with auto travel, the styling and engineering of high performance cars drew on developments in aviation technology, culminating in the ‘muscle car’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Technological advances achieved during the war years combined with the postwar space age to create an emphasis on performance. PERFORMANCE AND THE ROAD TO THE ‘MUSCLE CAR’ Concept car drawings, such as those at center and far right, were used by designers to evoke and evaluate often fanciful themes and ideas. Illustrations of production cars, such as the four Oldsmobile sedans at right, can be understood as highly finished presentation drawings, the result of a long process of design and refinement. The soaring American car market after WWII was the driving force behind the emergence of automotive art, a subspecialty that evolved from the technical drawings of automobile production to the color advertising of glossy period magazines. Sharf, as well as the kind cooperation of the MFA, Boston. The Redwood Library gratefully acknowledges support from collectors Jean S.
Yet as this exhibition makes clear, these are marvelously rendered works every bit as loaded with cultural meaning and aesthetic value as more traditional ‘high art’ drawings. The bulk of design drawings tended to be discarded as non-art-as the functional by-product of the car design process. Whatever stability and prestige automobile designers gained through the institutionalization of their profession, it is also the studio system that diminished the artistic merit that attached to their work. There, styling answered consumer demand for futuristic design, for performance or utility, presented through an array of themes that partook of advertising: romance, dynamism, or the family. If the twin fields of automobile and industrial design had already emerged in the 1930s, it was the growth of consumerism after the war years that forced an evolution towards ‘styling’ and the emergence of a second generation of car designers groomed in the studio system of the Detroit automakers. The optimism of the American postwar era ushered in what is now regarded as the ‘great age’ of automotive art, a moment when American engineering know-how was matched to a resurgence of artistic talent, yielding some of the finest automotive design drawings ever produced.
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