Customer Reviews

Curves of Steel: Streamlined Automobile Design

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The twenty-two cars featured jump off the page because of Michael Furman's extraordinary photography. Each car starts on a spread and most have a large beautiful profile shot though three have immaculate line art instead: 1934 Chrysler Airflow; 1936 Bugati 57SC Atlantic; 1938 Bentley Embiricos. These weren't available for studio shots. I don't think you'll see better car photos anywhere because Furman has a knack of lighting highly polished curved metal that almost seems unreal.

The book is based on an exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum and I find it remarkable that so many of these cars were assembled for display in one place. Though the book/exhibition is subtitled Streamlined Automobile Design it doesn't cover every car to fit that description. There is no Buick Y-Job, GM's LeSabre or any Cadillacs (Furman has photographed these in The Art and Colour of General Motors) but what is included is a fascinating selection of American (seven) European (ten) and Racing (five) cars that reflect the best in styling and engineering excellence.

Predictably hardly any of the cars were truly massed produced. The Chrysler Airflow and 1948 Tucker seem to be the only ones. The rest fall into the concept or specialist car arena, especially the European models like the 1939 Delahaye or the 1937 Dubonnet Hispano Xenia. What a pity that the 1941 Chrysler Thunderbolt (my favorite) didn't make it. It looks the epitome of no-nonsense streamline design and just the sort of car to be on the drive of every home on Elm Street or Cortland Drive back then.

The book's production is as immaculate as Furman's photos, printed on matt art with the images in an impressive 300 screen. Every car has several photos and some brief text about its history and the designer (each with a lovely head drawing by William Beauchamp) and something I found interesting: a description of how the models have changed hands over the years and who owns them now.

I doubt you will ever see finer car photos than those featured in this gorgeous book.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

As an art curator, I am uneasy about the practice of exhibiting automobiles or motorcycles in the halls of art museums. It is my gut feeling that many museum directors are secretly bored by paintings and sculpture and therefore want to exhibit something "new and different." There is also a strong motivation to bring in new visitors and donors, to increase the "box office" and then sell books and other souvenirs at the gift shop. That said, the exhibitions that were held at the Guggenheim and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were beautifully produced and each resulted in a lavish catalog.

The book under review here is Curves of Steel, the beautiful catalog that was produced in conjunction with the exhibition of streamlined automobiles at the Phoenix Art Museum back in 2007. Edited by Jonathan A. Stein, the book features essays on twenty-two automobiles, written by a number of authorities, including Stein, the prolific Ken Gross, Dana Meredith, Beverly Rae Kimes, Geoff Wardle and Richard Adatto. Michael Furman, who seems to get any assignment when the words "automobile" and "lavish production" are put together, photographed the cars that were selected. In this case, Furman actually dreamed up the exhibition with his friend Johnathan A. Stein, a noted automotive authority. As one would expect for a museum production, the catalog is beautifully designed, with several different images of each car and a drawing of its creator.
The concept for the exhibition was to show the development of the automobile as the car "grew up" and the forces of modern design and a growing awareness of the laws of aerodynamics began to shape the way cars looked. So, as the boxy shapes of early automobiles were replaced by curvy, wind cheating bodies, the automobile reached what many enthusiasts saw as its golden age, that lasted from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, when the beginning of World War II caused the curtain to come down on the automotive beauty show. Ironically, only a few of the cars that were selected for this book were produced in any quantity and the ones that did manage to achieve "production" were often built by coachbuilders in their studios, rather than on an assembly line.

The influential Chrysler Airflow is here, a brilliant 1934 concept that reached production, but without some of the show car's most striking - and difficult to produce - features. Alas, the design was too homely, too different for the public to embrace and the car's limited production only lasted three years. The Auburn Speedster was an automobile that was aerodynamically smoothed, but one that managed to look masculine and powerful while still "cheating the wind." Fast and and rare, the Speedster was an extraordinary piece of rolling art that was produced while the country was in the throes of the Great Depression. The odd, almost unknown, teardrop-shaped Stout Scarab was a product of the innovative engineer William Stout. It was an attempt to smooth airflow and rearrange the passenger compartment of a large car at the same time, but as the product of a dreamer, only a handful of the cars were produced.

The low and wide Cord 812 was absolutely unique. Called "the most unorthodox car in the world today," the Cord was commissioned by Harold Ames of Dusenberg as a baby "Dusie." Gordon Buehrig designed the Cord, which was the embodiment of American automotive modernity. The well-smoothed Lincoln Zephyr was a car with a classic streamlined Art Deco style. It reached production just before the war and actually sold well. The beautifully photographed bullet-shaped Chrysler Thunderbolt was a styling exercise that was created in 1941 as a "new milestone in Airflow design." The ill-fated Tucker, another product of a dreamer concludes the book's section on American cars.

In Europe, the French led the move toward more streamlined shapes and the Phoenix exhibition featured the 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic that has been in Southern California for many decades. Owned by Dr. Peter Williamson and one of only three of these curvaceous, teardrop shaped stunners, it was restored in recent years to its original specifications, as designed for Lord Philippe de Rothschild. One of the more unusual cars included in the book is the Peugeot 402 special built for the dealer Darl'mat. Influenced by the Chrysler Airflow, the body was designed by Georges Paulin and built by Marcel Pourtout. These lightweight cars had a very small frontal area, a wonderfully curved roof and a pair of curvaceous rear fenders. These cars entered limited production in 1938, but the war interrupted it a year later.

While French automobiles are now known today for their odd styling, during the 1930s, they set standards in streamlined beauty that have seldom been matched. One of the most eccentric cars of the streamlined era was the Dubonnet Hispano H-6C "Xenia," a collaboration between the World War I flying ace and aperitif heir Andre Dubonnet, the aerodynamicist Jean Andreau and craftsman Jospeh Saotchik. Styled like an airplane and constructed on a sturdy Spanish Hipano-Suiza chassis, the long, streamlined creation is a strange-but-sleekly futuristic creation.

The Phoenix show had a number of the finest examples of French aerodynamic design including the teardrop-shaped 1937 Delage D8-120S, the Darracq/Talbot-Lagot T150-C bodied by the immortal Figoni & Falaschi, a 1938 Talbot-Lago in the Jeancart style and a 1939 Delahye Type 165 roadster bodied by Figoni & Falaschi and owned by Peter Mullin of Los Angeles, the premier collector of French automobiles from the streamlined era. This volume does have some odd looking automobiles as designers and engineers ended up on some cul-de-sacs in their search for automotive perfection. The most unusual effort at streamlining included here is the Czech Tatra T87, which actually entered production before World War II and then again afterwards, before the new communist overlords decreed that Tatra would build trucks rather than bourgeois passenger cars.

The concluding section of the book consists of aerodynamically styled racing cars, which feel like a bit of an afterthought. While the section opens with the 1937 Delahaye "145 million Franc Prize" racing car in French blue the rest of the automobiles included here are post-war models. I would have included some additional pre-war racing cars like Auto Union or Mercedes streamliners, rather than to stretch matters into the 1950s and inclusion of the Bruce Meyer's 1952 So Cal Belly Tanker that was created for competition on the dry lakes and Bonneville Salt Flats, a very special 1957 Ferrari Testa Rossa, also owned by the same connoisseur, the Olds Aerotech and McLaren F1 coupe. These are all very special automobiles, but they seem like part of another exhibit, perhaps a part deux.

Overall, this exhibition catalog is well written and oh-so-easy on the eyes, with stunning photographs of each the automobiles in their stunning current condition. The historian in me would have enjoyed a page or two of period photographs to place each car in its era, but the downside to these large coffee-table books is that they are intended to be light reading and sumptuous to view, which this one certainly is.

The book is beautifully presented and written and will appeal to students of automobile design and those who have a love affair with automobiles....

I bought this book for my dad's 80th birthday. When I saw this book I knew he would love it. The photography is unlike anything that I have seen. He has a huge collection of books. His main interests are WWII hardware (tanks, planes, ships, etc.) and automobiles from the late 40's and earlier. Should have waited until the end of the day to give it to him though....He promptly sat down in his favorite chair and did not say a word until it was time to go. He smiled, gave me a big hug, thanked me, told me he loved me and promptly sat back down with his book. Bravo to all responsible for the book and for making my dad smile!!!

Michael Furman is one of the best automotive photographers ever! And these cars are beautiful. The book is full of Art Deco/streamlined beauties.