Stephen Bayley

The Jaguar F-Type is no E-Type

In 1951, Arthur Drexler, an influential curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organised an exhibition called 8 Automobiles. Drexler, who used to wear a bow tie, was one of the people who helped make ‘design’ the credible subject it is today.

The press release said it was the ‘first exhibition anywhere of automobiles selected for design’ — as, indeed, it was. Eight fine cars were presented on a dramatic fake roadway with huge photographic enlargements of details as a backdrop.

Drexler’s boss at the museum, the architect and one-time Nazi sympathiser Philip Johnson — and in those days New York’s arbiter elegantiarum — explained, ‘Automobiles are hollow, rolling sculpture, and the refinements of their design are fascinating.’ Quite so.

Ten years later, the Jaguar E-Type was launched at a lavish event in the Parc des Eaux Vives, a spiffy restaurant on the shores of Lake Geneva. International correspondents were astonished by the car’s combination of lascivious (some thought flagrantly erotic) looks, category-bending performance and accessible pricing. Ever since, the Jaguar has routinely been described as ‘the most beautiful car ever made’. In 1996 an E-Type entered the permanent collection at MoMA, the first mass-produced car to do so.

It is neither a very old nor a very new idea that machines can be beautiful. John Ruskin found machinery repellent, especially if it involved pistons whose relentless intromittent action perhaps reminded him of the coition he found so disconcerting. But the inheritors of Ruskin’s art theory, early Modernists including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, found cars thrilling exemplars of the mechanised perfection they wanted to bring to buildings. Indeed, both Gropius and Corb designed their own cars (although the former’s was not a success and the latter’s a high-concept publicity stunt).

Now that painting is moribund, a relic of a once-important but now irrelevant discipline, and artists will discuss anything other than beauty, manufactured products and experiences are most people’s introduction to aesthetics.

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