Our relationship with the automobile is at an inflection point. The car has provided the freedom and motivation essential to the American promise. It has showcased every significant design and engineering trend of the past 135 years. Yet it is also the source of sprawl and congestion, of roadway deaths, of pollutants responsible for climate change and respiratory ailments. Electric and self-driving vehicles may usher in solutions, but their widespread production and adoption remains a thing of the distant future.
“This is absolutely a moment when we’re rethinking our history with things that we used to love and cherish, and acknowledging that some of those things maybe were poisonous, or bad ideas, or death traps,” says Paul Galloway, collection specialist for the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design and co-organizer (under former curator Juliet Kinchin, and with curatorial assistant Andrew Gardner) of “Automania,” opening this summer.
MoMA pioneered the induction of cars into the pantheon of high art under Architecture and Design curator Arthur Drexler, who organized “8 Automobiles” in 1951, which lionized the car as “hollow, rolling sculpture” and celebrated its emerging role in midcentury culture. He reprised some of these concepts in “Ten Automobiles” in 1953, and in 1966 he revealed “The Racing Car: Toward a Rational Automobile,” which demonstrated how innovations in consumer automotives were rooted in the competitive push of race cars.
The vehicles in these exhibits were loaned to the museum by collectors or manufacturers. But in 1972, MoMA began adding cars to its holdings as design objets—the first American art museum to recognize the automobile as such. “Automania” will display cars from the permanent collection—indoors throughout the show’s run, as well as outdoors in the sculpture garden during the summer months—including a 1948 Cisitalia 202 GT, the museum’s first auto acquisition.
“There’s a lot of debate and research and protracted process through which a car finally enters the collection,” Kinchin says. “But we’re definitely thinking about what innovation—artistic, technological, social—it showcases, what moment it really pinpoints.” Galloway adds that the collection demonstrates an obvious European bias, with a Jeep being the only domestic car included. “I’m not a nationalist, but at the same time there’s not enough damn American cars in there.”
“Automania” recontextualizes MoMA’s automotive acquisitions in light of contemporary understandings, showing them to be, as Galloway says, “immensely pleasurable things to look at” while also taking them down off the plinth and examining how they impacted culture and art.
The show takes its name from a dystopic Academy Award-nominated 1963 animated short film, Automania 2000, which features in the exhibit. Created by husband-and-wife team John Halas and Joy Batchelor (famed for their adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm), it presages a future in which increasingly grandiose cars overrun civilization. The film plays alongside drawings, paintings, and photos by well-known artists, including a lithograph of an early automobile driver terrorizing the streets of Paris by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; an Andy Warhol silkscreen of a car crash from his Death and Disaster series; a car hood painted in gynocentric imagery by Judy Chicago; and photos of Ford’s massive River Rouge production plant by Margaret Bourke-White. It also spotlights less known work, like automotive upholstery samples woven by Anni Albers and designs for a folding steel car seat by Lilly Reich, both prominent 1930s Bauhaus designers.
“Women have actually been featured in these stories from the beginning,” says Kinchin. “That was something we wanted to tease out.”
Period advertisements, some included in the catalog and some in the show itself, enunciate a studied critique. A 1914 Bosch spark plug poster by German artist Lucian Bernhard demonstrates, according to Kinchin, “that sense of combustion energy, against all odds, winning out against electric-powered vehicles” in the early automotive era. An ad for tetrahedral lead in gasoline promotes an additive which was “completely unnecessary,” Galloway says, “and an ecological disaster.”
The cars in the museum are now static objects. They’re devoid of their seductive sound and smell, rendered immobile by the removal of their batteries and vital fluids, lest the presence of these corrosive materials impact the conservation of other items in the permanent collection. They have become beautiful cadavers.
This may be an apt memorial as the individually owned, gasoline-powered automobile moves away from its central role in our national narrative and toward some evanescent future: electrified, self-driving, shared.
“Any artwork in a museum, on one level, is a relic,” says Kinchin. “But cars are also showstopping, gorgeous objects that everyone can relate to—whether it’s with disgust, compassion, or contempt.”
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