Fred Cole

Fred Cole (1893-1983) was an illustrator who seems to have specialized in automobile advertising. I could find little about him on the internet and nothing in my own reference library. Fortunately, the Web did have this link which provides useful information regarding his work and personality.

Among other things, Cole provided the illustration for what many in the advertising trade consider one of the greatest and most influential ads of all time: the Jordan Motor Car Company's "Somewhere West of Laramie."

The are two somewhat opposing advertising content strategies. One is to make a rational case for the product being advertised by dealing with its features. The other is the Jordan approach, eliciting positive emotion regarding a product or the company that makes the product. In practice, most advertisements offer some of each, though in recent decades the tendency is towards emotion, rather than rationality. A case in point are the TV commercials aired during the annual Super Bowl football game.

As for Cole, his car illustrations were unusual in that he left out parts of cars rather than being conventional and depicting the whole thing. That is, cars were suggested rather than portrayed. Even more interesting is that Cole did similar illustration for several carmakers, even during the same model year. One would expect that advertising managers and sales directors would want ads looking distinct from those of competitors. But that was 90 or so years ago, so perhaps the game was played differently then.

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The famous advertisement from 1923.

Cole illustrated advertisements for the luxury Lincoln brand, this example from 1925. Here most of the car is shown, but not all. This approach works well with the vignette style of the advertisement where incompleteness is expected.

Another Jordan ad, this for a not-sporty 1926 Victoria sedan. Note that Cole entirely omitted the rear wheel.

Chrysler ad from the same year. Here Cole shows only a fragment of the subject.

Yet another 1926 advertisement, this for Oldsmobile, a Chrysler and Jordan competitor.

Artwork for a 1932 Dodge ad that nicely evokes speed.

Most Cole car illustrations imply speed. In this instance he does this by fading out the aft part of the 1935 LaSalle.

LaSalle publicity for 1940. A more solid looking car as Cole makes use of the airbrush rendering style popular around that time.

Dodge truck ad from 1947. Trucks are not flashy, speedy cars, so here Cole's illustration is conventional.
Cross-posted at Art Contratian.

The Tiny, Fairly Attractive (For Its Size) Gutbrod

The German Gutbrod company built cars and motorcycles off and on from 1926 to 1954 (Wikipedia entry here).

The car's unusual name was that of its founder, Wilhelm Gutbrod (1890-1948).  I call the name Gutbrod unusual because it's pronounced the same as gut brot ("good bread" in English).

This post deals with 1950-54 Gutbods, tiny cars with two-cylinder, two-stoke motors delivering about 20 horsepower.  Only 7,726 were built.

I've seen it mentioned fairly often and mention it myself: small cars are harder to design than large ones.  So it's no surprise that many small cars are not very attractive.  Those post- World War 2 Gutbods were no beauties, but they were not ugly either -- especially considering how small they were.

Let's look at some images from here and there on the Internet.

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Gutbrods only held two people, and this helped their styling.   The passenger compartment took up a comparatively (to a hypothetical four-passenger version) small part of the car's length.  A result was a  long-looking hood that was balanced by a non-trivial bustle-back trunk.

Rear quarter view.  Note the subtle crease along the trunk centerline.

Now two Wikimedia-sourced photos.  Gutbrods featured modern-looking pontoon fenders with round wheel cut-outs that reduced what visual bulk there might have otherwise been.  Like the trunk lid, the hood has a central crease, adding strength and interest.   The grille is simple, but the shaping of the bars extends the hood crease down the car's front.

The metal part of the greenhouse has a strong, simple shape with good proportions for a car of its size.

The hood looks quite long from this perspective.

Gutbrod also made a few sports cars.  This is the 1950 prototype.

The production version got a different body that seems to have been inspired by the Jaguar XK120.  A less-successful design than the coupé's.

Málaga's Fine Automobile Museum

The Museo Automovilistico y de la Moda in Málaga, Spain is surprisingly good, being based on the collection of the Portuguese João Manuel Magalhães.

I was in Málaga in November while on a Mediterranean cruise and running out of things to see within walking distance of the cruise port.  I knew there was a car museum in town, but it was located about two miles from city center, and getting there required taking a taxi or a bus.  Would seeing it be worth the transportation trouble?  Since the same collection of buildings (a former tobacco processing factory) also housed a branch of St. Petersburg's Russian Museum, I decided that being able to kill two museum birds with one travel stone would be worthwhile.

The car museum's web page is here.  Note that it features period women's fashions as well as cars.  I suppose one reason for combining the two subjects was for wives of visiting car guys to be entertained as well.  Another justification for this pairing is that, especially in 1930s France, there were automobile concours featuring cars along with very well-dressed society women.

Below are some of the photos I took of the large collection.  I hope they give you a sense of what was on view.

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Museum Entrance

1930 Nash 400
Setting the scene: This car has a custom body, something unusual for Nash.   Note the women's clothing displays featuring fashion from about the same period as the car.  The automobile in the background is a 1931 Studebaker FD Commander.

1952 Aston Martin DB2
Behind is a 1952 Jaguar XK120 Coupé.

1936 Auburn 851
The famous last-of-its-kind boat-tail Auburn.  The background car is a 1927 Belgian FN (Fabrique Nationale) 1300 S.

1928 Ballot Model 2LT
The collection includes examples of seldom-seen brands such as this.  Behind it is a Lancia limousene.

1934 DeSoto Airflow
Yet another rare automobile, though I doubt this car left the factory with that color.  In the background is a 1937 Cord 812 Cabriolet.

1934 Lancia Dilambda
Body by Pinin Farina.  Behind is a 1930 Pierce-Arrow 143 rumble seat convertible coupe.

1927 Paige
Another brand seldom seen in car museums.

1938 Panhard et Levassor X77 Dynamic
This coupé strikes me as being pretty rare.  I am not sure if its paint colors are original.

1937 Peugeot 402 Eclipse
Peugeot marketed retractable metal-top cars in the late '30s.

General Motors' Windshield Design Evolution,1929-1963

Nowadays automobile windshields are seldom distinctive enough to catch one's eye. Other design features such as frontal styling, the side-window profiles, fender shapes and rear-end detailing get more attention when casually looking at a vehicle.

But during the 35 or so years from the end of the 1920s to the early 1960s windshield designs were an important design component subject to fashion as well as evolving function.

General Motors dominated the American (and world) automobile industry during those 35-odd years.  GM didn't always innovate styles and design details, but it had the resources to quickly acquire those that it didn't develop first.  For that reason, I decided to use some GM cars to illustrate how windshields changed.  In the images below, I mostly used the corporation's mid-line Oldsmobile brand, but brought in some Chevrolet and Buick models where needed.  Unless otherwise noted, the photos below are of cars for sale, factory publicity photos, and images from sources I cannot identify.

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1929 Oldsmobile
A typical windshield arrangement at the end of the 1920s.  There was flat glass mounted vertically and topped by a fixed metal sun visor.

1932 Oldsmobile
Aerodynamic considerations that greatly influenced styling as the 1930s wore on were just beginning to appear by 1932.  The exterior sun visor is gone and the windshield appears to be sloped back a few degrees.

1933 Oldsmobile Eight
A little more slope was introduced for 1933 while the windshield itself remains a flat, one-piece affair.

1935 Oldsmobile Six
Oldsmobiles were redesigned for 1935, becoming much more rounded.  The windshield is sloped back even more.  Glass is still in the form of flat planes, but now in two pieces forming a shallow V.

1937 Oldsmobile Six
The next redesign featured yet more slope along with the two-piece glass.

1940 Oldsmobile 90
Windshields are little changed on this new GM C-body.  Here the glass areas is larger and A-pillars are thinner.

1948 Oldsmobile Futuramic 98
GM's first post- World War 2 redesigns appeared for the 1948 model year on Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs.  The windshield remains split, but the glass is now curved thanks to improved glass-forming technology.

1950 Oldsmobile 98
The new 1950 C-bodies received curved, one-piece windshields.  Other GM models retained the two-piece curved arrangement.

1951 Oldsmobile Super 88
For 1951, B-body cars got one-piece windshields with a slightly different curve profile than their C-body cousins.

1954 Buick Special
For 1954, GM's B- and C-bodies featured futuristic wraparound (panoramic) windshields, setting off a new industry-wide fashion.  The B-body Buick shown here has A-pillars leaning forwards.

1954 Buick Super - Barrett-Jackson auction photo
C-body GM cars also had wraparounds, but the A-pillars were vertical.

1955 Chevrolet One-Fifty - Mecum auction photo
The following model year saw redesigned A-body cars with vertical A-pillars.

1957 Oldsmobile Super 88 - Mecum photo
Oldsmobiles were re-bodied for 1957.  Panoramic windshields were retained, A-pillars leaned forwards, but were thinner.

1959 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88
All General Motors cars got a crash redesign for 1959.  A-pillars were now curved towards the top, giving the windshields a compound-curve feeling.  Actually, there was no strong compound curving here, but '59 Chryslers did have it.

1961 Oldsmobile
For 1960, Ford dropped panoramic windshields, reverting to the traditional aft-leaning A-pillars.  GM followed suit the next year.  Wraparounds were criticized for having distortion, and the dog-leg front door openings made ingress and egress more difficult.  Performing the Old Switcheroo routine, the 1959 A-pillar curve at the top became a curve at the pillar's bottom in 1961.

1963 Buick Wildcat
Now windshields have become conventional: one-piece, curved, with aft-leaning A-pillars.

Did Touring's 1939 Alfa 6C SS Influence 1941 Packard Clipper Styling?

The short answer to the question posed in this post's title is: Probably not, but the similarity is there.

That could be said regarding quite a few paired designs that had no direct influence on one another because some styling themes are "in the air" to be grabbed by more than one stylist at about the same time.  This was probably the case with the Alfa Romeo and Packard.

Background on the Alfa 6C 2500 series is here (scroll down), and the Packard Clipper here.

The Alfa Romero 6C 2500 SS Coupé design in question was by Carrozzeria Touring, first appearing in 1939 and continuing with post-war detail changes until 1951.

Design work on the Packard Clipper started in 1938, and was probably finalized in 1939 or early 1940.  It was announced in April 1941, well into the 1941 model year.  For that reason, some sources call it a 1942 model.  Packard model policies in those days complicated matters because its cars were not given model year designations, being referred to as Series XX or Series XX+1 (insert sequence numbers for the X's) and model type numbers (the first Clippers were model number 1951, not to be confused with the year 1951).

Design of the Clipper was, as usual, a committee effort complicated by the fact that outside consultants offered ideas as well as members of Packard's small styling staff.  A detailed account can be found in the classic book A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design by Michal Lamm and David Holls.

Some of the stylists involved with the Clipper design must have kept current with both production and custom European designs, and therefore could have been aware of Touring's new Alfa styling.  On the other hand, the Alfa probably appeared around the time most Clipper features had been settled.  This is why, until more information appears, I think the similarities were a case of being "in the 1938-1939 air."

Here are images of both cars.

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Photo of perhaps the original Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 SS Coupé by Touring.  Not very good image quality, as I scanned it from this book, page 209.  Items to note are the grille / front bumper theme, the fadeaway front fender and the separate rear fender.  This is the earliest example of front fenders fading away on doors that I am aware of.  If any reader knows of earlier cases, please let us know in a comment.

A 1941 publicity photo of the Clipper.  Compare its grille / front bumper theme, fadeaway front fender and separate rear fender to the Alfa in the previous photo.  Nothing is identical, but the differences are not large.

A 1948 Touring 6C 2500 SS offered for sale.  The grille, headlight positioning and front fender side sculpting are different from the 1939 version, but not greatly.  I'm including this and another photo of the car because they are better quality than the image at the top.

A 1941 Packard Clipper for sale.  This offers a better view of the frontal design.

Rear three-quarter view of the Alfa.

Rear three-quarter view of a for-sale 1942 Packard Clipper.

Chrysler'c C-200, Convertible Version of the K-310

Starting with the first publicity of General Motors' Le Sabre in late December of 1950 that I wrote about here, "dream cars" became a must-do item for American car makers.

The first Chrysler Corporation dream car that was given considerable attention was the 1951 K-310 designed by Virgil Exner and crafted by Ghia in Italy.  My post about it is here.  The following year a convertible version called the C-200 was created.  Some background information is here.

Since the C-200 was sort of an afterthought that had no new styling features, it is essentially an unknown concept car nowadays.  Even in 1952 it was little-publicized, so I could find few photos of it on the Internet.

Several of those images are presented below.

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To set the scene, a photo of the K-310.

The C-200 as seen in April 1952 at New York City's Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

General view of the C-200

Publicity shot.

Color image of the C-200.  Here it is painted two-tone blue, similar to one color scheme the K-310 sported.  When I was a lad I saw the C-200 at the Seattle auto show.  At that time the dark area was painted black and the lower part was a pale chartreuse.  Given that the C-200 was a year or possibly two years old when I saw it, I have to think that its main rôle was that of a show car to be sent around the country for displays at car shows and perhaps car dealers.