Moving Beauty

David Kimmel is a Ph.D. candidate in history at York University.

If you like beautifully illustrated books, you will like this one. If
you’re a classic-cars enthusiast, you’ll like it too, but it won’t
add much to your knowledge. If you’re interested in the history of art
and design, and concerned about the direction of our cultural
institutions, beware: this catalogue might sadden you. It and the
exhibition it accompanies are signs of the modern-day museum’s
perceived need to market itself to the masses at almost any cost.

In the process of making itself accessible (at least with this effort),
the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has neglected the basic tenets of art
history. The 50 objects highlighted in this show are not properly
contextualized in terms of 20th-century social history. The book’s
claim that each vehicle “reflected the spirit of its age” is not
borne out in the text. Intellectually grounded themes such as “the
relationship between art and the automobile” are sidestepped simply
because other scholars have covered that terrain. The rationale of this
book is reduced, sadly, to the fact that these cars make the MMFA’s
galleries look marvelous.

This coffee-table book consists mainly of photographs of the show’s
specimens. The brief introduction tries without much success to pull the
pieces of the show together. There are biographies of most of the main
personalities, a decent bibliography, and technical data on each car as
well as a short account of the vehicle’s development. Little in these
blurbs derives from original research on the part of the exhibition’s
curators. Notably absent are the more common stories of dismal failures,
particularly those of designers who were bent on making cars that looked
good but added little to the development of the field, much in the
spirit of this exhibition.