How They Built Cars When Beauty Was All That Mattered

There was a time when it didn’t matter if your crossover utility vehicle had a third-row seat, and there was no government standard saying the front end had to be able to whack a pedestrian in just such a way, or that a frontal collision at an angle of 14.5 degrees had to result in deformation of no fewer than… Okay, you get the idea. For a small handful of cars designed in the 1930s, all that mattered was beauty. And aerodynamics. The two often worked in concert.

A new exhibit running through April 30 at Florida’s Vero Beach Museum of Art celebrates “Rolling Sculpture: Streamlined Art Deco Automobiles and Motorcycles.” The exhibit was five years in the making but was worth it.

“We started five years ago and then COVID kind of got in the way,” said guest curator Ken Gross.

Gross had already done a somewhat similar show in 2018 at the North Carolina Museum of Art and at the Portland Museum of Art called “The Shape of Speed: Streamlined Automobiles and Motorcycles 1930-42.” Gross spoke with the Vero Museum’s director Brady Roberts, who had spoken with Portland Art Museum director Brian Ferriso, and things got going.

It is surely one of the most beautiful collections of beautiful cars ever assembled. What makes these cars so gorgeous?

“Well, it’s a combination of art deco features and streamlining,” said Gross. “But in that era they didn’t know much about the science of streamlining.”

There were no CAD computers at the time, remember.

“If you look at the Tatra (1938 Tatra T77A), engineered by Hans Ledwinka, a contemporary of Ferdinand Porsche, (designer) Paul Jaray was experimenting and that car actually had some wind tunnel development.”

Others benefited from aircraft design of the era.