Art: Hollow Rolling Sculpture

Visitors to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art have seen everything from eggbeaters to garbage cans displayed as works of art. Last week it was automobiles. On crushed stone runways in the museum’s first-floor galleries and garden stood shining examples of what the museum calls “hollow rolling sculpture.”

Museum judges shuffled through photographs of some 35 years of automaking, from early Bugattis and Stutz Bearcats to a 1951 Ford. Eliminating limousines and custom-built cars, they finally chose five European and three U.S. models for display. Then Curator Arthur Drexler wrote a learned catalogue discussing their “excellence as works of art.”

The winners:

¶ A 1930 Mercedes (Germany): the oldest car in the show. Drexler called it “an amusingly solemn piece of stagecraft” with “a necklace of lights, bumpers, straps, horns-and handles, undecorated but nevertheless expressively decorative, as were the caps and goggles which used to ornament the serious motorist.”

¶ 1937 Cord (U.S.): “A solemn expression of streamlining” with “a coffin-shaped hood . . .[suggesting] the driving power of a fast fighter plane.”

¶ A 1939 Bentley (Britain): “A patrician urbanity of style other schools of design have failed to render obsolete.”

¶ A 1939 Talbot (France): an elegant two-toned coupe with two perfume and vanity compartments for the ladies. “A composition of . . . voluptuous shapes.”

¶ A 1941 Lincoln Continental: the luxury car which Edsel Ford helped design in 1939, and which the company abandoned in 1948 because the model was not making money. The catalogue liked its smooth tight lines, wound up with the ultimate compliment: “The Lincoln Continental satisfies the requirements of connoisseurs.”

¶ A 1948 MG (Britain): “Stylistic understatement . . . artful simplicity.”

¶ A 1949 Cisitalia (Italy): a sleek, low-slung car with a grill resembling “the cut end of a cigar.”

¶ A 1951 Jeep: “The combined appeal of an intelligent dog and a perfect gadget. . . looks like a sturdy sardine can on wheels . . . one of the few genuine expressions of machine art.”

Not on display, but granted honorable catalogue mention: the 1949 Ford, 1947 Studebaker, 1939 Cadillac 60 Special and 1938 Lincoln Zephyr. Wrote Connoisseur Drexler in an accolade that, by clear implication, also rejected a good many other models that have come down the pike: “These cars contradict the claim that the American public prefers what is ugly, gross, or even vulgar . . . The dollar grin, as the American grille is known abroad, does not represent our best effort.”