A museum-quality car-boot sale: V&A’s Cars reviewed

We were looking at a 1956 Fiat Multipla, a charming ergonomic marvel that predicted today’s popular MPVs. Rather grandly, I said to my guide: ‘I think you’ll find the source of the Multipla in an unrealised 1930s design of Mario Revelli di Beaumont.’ He looked a bit blank.

This exhibition is a rare attempt to explain the car, perhaps the most dramatic since the Museum of Modern Art’s 1951 New York show where Philip Johnson coined the term ‘rolling sculpture’. It is both occasionally brilliant and continuously exasperating. Rather as if in a crowded restaurant you are overhearing snatches of fascinating conversation coming from different tables.

The context is significant. The V&A and the Science Museum were only separated in 1909. Into one went mechanisms that worked, into the other objets de vertu which sat still. Thus, the V&A was reluctant ever to add a car to its collections. This reluctance was magnified by Victorian taxonomy, so no one could decide if a car was ‘metalwork’ or ‘sculpture’.