High Art

High Art

By David Glenn Cox

In the development of the automobile the original idea was simply to replace horse power with mechanical power. No easy task, as the early builders struggled just to make the thing go down the road in a reasonable amount of time and for a reasonable amount of effort. They were attempting to perfect one technology and ended up changing the way all things are built and marketed.

They built on the existing technology of wagons and carts and merely motorized them. That solution was more than adequate for speeds under 20 mph, but after that, it became a bit dodgy. Quickly, the technology changed; almost overnight from the curved dash Oldsmobile to Billy Durant’s first Oldsmobile we see a renaissance of design, from tiller to steering wheel, large functional fenders, a horn and a parking brake. Still if we squint, we can still see a motorized horse carriage.

Carriage style headlamps, leather straps with a barrel shaped gas tank laid on its end and the trunk, was just that a leather trunk. As automotive technology progressed the vehicles were being marketed to the public on their dependability and durability. This was still a technology viewed with a skeptical eye, while many wanted a machine that could easily carry them into town, the automobile was a radical departure of life style. Listen to how early 20th Century comedian Cal Stewart portrays the automobile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih9qezA9DMc

Automobiles were dangerous, difficult to operate, too fast and very, very scary. Ten years later the designs are improved and different models were sold on cost from the Tin Lizzy to hand crafted models built from wood by artisans. Many of the early car companies only built chassis and sent them off to a coachbuilder for a body selected by the customer. It wasn’t until the technology was mastered to the point of public acceptance that automobiles began to be styled.

In 1899, J.W. Earl was working as just such a coachbuilder, but changing with the times, Earl changed his busines from building coaches to building automobiles bodies and accessories. He opened Earl Automobile Works in 1908 in Hollywood California, selling custom auto bodies to the silent film stars of the day. J. W. was so successful, he was able to send his son to Stanford University, but his son had other ideas, the son wanted to build cars.

Harley Earl had learned the business from his father, seeing the change from coach building to auto building. The Earl Automobile works was eventually sold to a local Cadillac dealer who kept Earl on as its director. Then fate stepped in, Harley Earl met Lawrence Fisher, Fisher was the general manager of Cadillac division of GM and a former coach builder himself, begining his own career with Fisher Body Works. Fisher was so taken by Earl’s methods of design, especially his use of clay for design models that he hired the Earl to design the 1927 LaSalle.

As you would expect for this sort of story, the model was so successful GM president Alfred P. Sloan agreed to create an Art & Color department at GM naming Harley Earl, as its first director. What? You mean General Motors was in business almost a quarter of a century without an art department? It is hard to believe, it is really hard to believe, but only because it is so unthinkable today. Form followed function; the fender was designed to keep mud off of you and if it did, it was successful. The engine hood covered the engine; it looked like what ever it needed to look like to cover the engine.

GM executives were unsure, unable to grasp the concept of an automobile as needing to be styled.

Stuck in the old ways they couldn’t fathom automobiles as being formal, dynamic, exciting and yes, sexy. You can just imagine these old grey headed dinosaurs saying, “But Mister Earl, why should we spend extra money just to make our vehicles look a certain way?” It was the typical clash of art versus money, but the technology was now mastered, everybody had a speedometer and a gas gauge. What could you do to make your product special? Derisively, Earl’s department became known as the Beauty Shop and Earl as one of the Pretty Picture Boys.

Harley Earl was promoted in 1937 to Vice President and his department was renamed the Styling Section. They began designing cars for a specific model year and marketing cars to specific customers, as the family car, the salesman’s car, the doctor’s car and the sports car. For the time it was revolutionary, it was Earl who began building concept cars to gauge the popularity of features before putting them into production.

Even if you’ve never heard the name Harley Earl you are familiar with his work.

After World War Two, Earl was given control of the top secret “project Opal” at GM, later to be known as the Chevrolet Corvette. It’s Harley Earl who was famously responsible for the tailfins on the GM models of the 1950’s. But it would be wrong to categorize a man who changed everything, as just the designer of the tail fin.

Earl was a giant who brought art to industry and changed the way automobiles were marketed and sold. Wrap around windshields, two-tone paint and chrome, interior packages taking automobiles from being simply a tool or a device to making them personal, making them a part of us, making them high art.