STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

‘THE V&A COULDN’T DECIDE IF A CAR WAS METALWORK OR SCULPTURE, AND INTELLECTUAL PARALYSIS SET IN’

There’s no question that car design, along with rock music and movies, is one of the most significant cultural expressions of the era now passing. But the car has an uneasy relationship with museums, traditional guardians and boosters of that culture. While David Bowie, Elton John’s trousers, Pink Floyd and Kylie Minogue’s knickers have been the subjects of blockbuster museum exhibitions in London, and the Deutsche Filmmuseum’s itinerant Stanley Kubrick show has drawn huge crowds over the past 15 years, of the car’s place in museumland there is not much to be said.

True, New York’s Guggenheim was inspired by the parking garage that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Porsche importer Max Hoffmann on Park Avenue, but Wright had a barmy fascination with cars, even installing petrol pumps in his Oak Park, Chicago, house so he could fuel-up his Model K Stoddard-Dayton. However, when the architect Norman Foster and I proposed a car exhibition to the very same Guggenheim last year, it was rejected with apathy.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged the first (and still the best) car design exhibition in 1951 and has since added a Pininfarina Cisitalia, an E-type and a Fiat

Cinquecento to its collection alongside the Picassos and Rothkos, but MoMA has never made a systematic attempt to analyse the artistic processes involved in creating man’s favourite artefact.

The Louvre once had the wit to display David Bache’s epochal Range Rover in its Musée des Arts Decoratifs, but then forgot all about car design. Meanwhile, my successors at London’s Design Museum staged a popular Ferrari show in 2017, but really all they did was truck in a floor of the factory’s museum in Maranello and present beautiful cars to an appreciative public, sparing visitors any perceptive critique of the Ferrari phenomenon.

This is because of lazy prejudices. Never get the idea that people working in art museums have any heightened aesthetic sense. While the Science Museum has a nice cross-section of an Issigonis Mini, its neighbour across the road, the imperious Victoria & Albert, never collected cars because of the hilariously feudal departmental system. Committees could not decide if a car was ‘metalwork’ or ‘sculpture’, and intellectual paralysis set in.

When I was working in the V&A in the ’80s, I decided

to do a little rascally disruption. For an exhibition called Art and Industry I borrowed a superb and aerodynamic 1949 Saab 92 from the factory in Trollhättan. This was to demonstrate the unlikely influence a science-fiction illustrator called Sixten Sason had upon Swedish manufacturing, the better to make my point about the art that contributed to everyday things. Sason, incidentally, also designed the body of the Hasselblad camera.

Visitors were fascinated by the exquisite Saab, but the museum staff ’s old guard were outraged. One ridiculous old buffer, a ceramics curator who pronounced the word with a hard ‘c’, barged into my office, hit my blindingly white Italian modernist desk and told me with great distaste, ‘You have traduced a great museum!’ So it is interesting that later this year the V&A is, at last, to give us an exhibition on car design. Cars: Accelerating The Modern World opens on 23 November.

But, on looking at the advance publicity, I am not sure what’s going on. None of Europe’s great experts on car design were consulted. And far from elevating the automobile to the status of art, the V&A seems intent on a trivialised car boot sale.

The contents seem arbitrary, anecdotal: a flapper’s cloche hat from the ’20s, an Art Deco bonnet mascot by René Lalique and a photograph of ‘booming lithium fields in Chile’, feeding electron-hungry Teslas. And, in deference to the sponsor, an ABS control unit by Bosch. If you want curios, why not the Art Deco scarf that throttled Isadora Duncan as she rode in an Amilcar along the Promenade des Anglais? Why not Rod Stewart’s key-ring from the Lamborghini he kept in Totteridge?

A Hispano-Suiza H6B is a very fine thing, but more the result of old craft processes than modern industrial design. And why compare it to a Messerschmitt KR200? It’s like comparing Raphael to Jeff Koons. Moreover, the V&A has lost its fact-checkers. Someone thinks Ledwinka’s Tatras were made not in Moravia but in the Czech Republic, which came into existence only in 1993.

So the great mystery of car design remains unexamined by the world’s greatest design museum, perhaps because it is difficult to understand. How did this primary product from the second age of industrialisation stimulate the creation of the most beautiful machines ever made? The V&A cannot tell us, but one day someone will.