"Impression" -- Chip Foose's Reimagined '37 Ford Roadster

For a reason I've never been able to explain, I've never been a hot rod or kustom kar fancier.  Somehow, I always thought that tangible, production-based cars should remain stock.  This excepts those expensive classic cars of yore by coachbuilding firms that worked from a bare chassis-plus-frontal-metalwork.  Ditto concept cars.

The present post deals with what at first might seen to be a 'rod with a kustom body.  But it's not.  It's the Impression, an essentially-built-from-scratch (as best I can tell) car with modern components having a body inspired by 1930s Fords.

The design-builder is Chip Foose, trained in industrial design at the famed Art Center in Pasadena.   His web site is here.

Impression, a commissioned car costing a huge amount of money, appeared in 2006 and won an important design contest, as reported in Autoweek here.  The article mentions:

"That car was the one everyone generally acknowledged would go home with the nine-foot-tall trophy for America’s Most Beautiful Roadster. That car, the Impression, was designed and built by Chip Foose and is owned by Ken Reister. Other owners quoted costs from $1.6 million to $2.2 million, depending on how much they wanted to emphasize the gap between their cars and Foose’s. Neither Reister nor Foose would say how much it cost, and who really keeps track once they hit seven figures, anyway? But Foose did say the car sports 4000 handcrafted pieces and was started six years ago. True, it sat for about three and a half years while Foose and company tended to other projects, but this one got a lot of attention. ...

"'There’s some ’34, ’36 and ’37,' Foose told us, as he set up the display around the Impression. 'I took my favorite cues from those and from 1930s Mercedes influences. Everything was as if you took a ’36 or ’37 Ford and modernized it—if you had a stock ’36 or ’37 next to it, you would see the resemblance.'"

Below are paired images of Foose's Impression and a rare, non-customized '37 Ford so that you can evaluate his work given that starting point.  Photos of the 1937 Ford DeLuxe Roadster are from RM Sotheby's auction web site.  Those of the Impression were taken by me at the Petersen Automotive Museum in the Spring of 2017. Click on any of them to enlarge.

Gallery

This is the museum's plaque.  It refers to Impression as being derived from a 1936 Ford design.

Here is a 1936 Ford.  Little of it is apparent on Foose's design.  Below are comparison photos of Impression and a 1937 Ford.

Front quarter views.  The Impression is lower and therefore visually longer.  The grille is raked back at a greater angle, plus there are no hood side vents.  Also missing are bumpers, this allowing Foose's sculpting to be better appreciated.

Impression's driving position is farther aft than on an actual '37 Ford.  This side view shows its hot rod design heritage in its notionally lowered chassis and the resulting awkward relationships of the wheels to the fender wheel openings.  I hate those chromed wheels that totally contrast with the otherwise clean design.  But (sigh) it's supposed to be a hot rod, so we just have to deal with it.

The real Ford has a rumble seat, a detail Foose probably wisely omitted.

1937 Fords were designed by Briggs, the company's body supplier.  According to Henry Dominguez (here, page 146), Edsel Ford told Briggs to use E.T. (Bob) Gregorie's Lincoln Zephyr frontal design features.  Both the Ford and the Impression have functional headlight components behind styled glass facings.

Read More

Real and Fake Cars in 20th Century American Illustration

This is a slightly modified Art Contrarian post appearing at the same time as this one.  It deals with contrasting examples of how automobiles were depicted in American magazines 1945-1975.  One famous illustrator took pains to paint accurate images, whereas cars in cover art for a major magazine were "styled" by the illustrators.

I just got my copy of David Apatoff's long-awaited book about Bernie Fuchs, who many of us consider the greatest illustrator active in the waning days of large-circulation, general-interest magazines.  Actually, Fuchs can be ranked as one of the very best American illustrators ever.

During his brief career-building phase (he rocketed to the top by the time he was in his late 20s) Fuchs spent a few years in Detroit working on advertisement and brochure illustrations for automobiles.   He mostly did backgrounds and settings, leaving rendering of the car to a specialist.   But Apatoff's book suggests that he might have illustrated cars from time to time: he definitely paid close attention to how that was done.

Because of that background, he wasn't afraid to include cars in some of his advertising and editorial assignments, and those cars were easy to identify.  That is, he didn't invent his own designs for generic cars.

This is in contrast to the depiction of automobiles on covers of the Saturday Evening Post, the leading American general-interest magazine for most of the first two-thirds of the 20th century.  I did a Google search for usable images of Post covers that included automobiles for inclusion in this blog post.   I didn't turn up every Post cover from 1945 through 1959 (my target era).  All covers can be found on the Post web site, but they are watermarked and therefore not usable here.   What I found was that most car designs were totally made up by the illustrator.   In a few cases, cars pictured were close to actuality, but partly hidden by other subject matter.

Why did this happen?  The Saturday Evening Post was a favorite "ad buy" for advertising agencies with automotive clients. Every issue could be counted on having a number of car ads.   So my guess is that the magazine's editors and art directors instructed illustrators to avoid portraying actual cars, this so that advertisers would not be offended.   ("Hey, guys, we spend tons of money on Chevrolet ads and your latest cover featured a Ford!!  Are you giving them a free plug or something?  We just might switch more of our budget to Life and Collier's.")

If anyone knows for sure why the Post featured generic cars, please let us know in Comments.

Gallery

Fuchs story illustration showing a mid-1950s Volkswagen.  Click on the Fuchs images to enlarge.

At the left is a 1960 DeSoto. Behind it, across the street, is a 1959 Plymouth.  I'm not sure why Bernie was featuring Chrysler Corporation products here.

This Fuchs view of the Brooklyn baseball stadium in the late 1940s might have been painted in the mid-1970s, judging by the style.   The blue car at the right is a 1946-48 vintage Chrysler.   Note that Fuchs has a blurred image of a man screening part of the sharply-done car.  Amazing how he combined the two styles without destroying the car's details.  He must have painted the car first and very carefully added the man and his hat.  The car behind the Chrysler is a 1946 Buick.

Here Fuchs fudged things slightly.  The car is a 1957 Imperial (yet another Chrysler product).  But he didn't paint a small point on the chrome strip above the headlights, above which was a small crest.   That is, he very thinly disguised the car.

Saturday Evening Post - 24 March 1945
This wartime illustration, when no American cars were being built, shows a 1941 Ford. A reference book of mine has a photo of what seems to be this car -- same police sign, same license plate.

Saturday Evening Post - 22 September 1951
This police car is a 1949 or 1950 Ford. However, clipping off the front and rear ends and placing the man in front of the car make it hard to identify for many people.

Saturday Evening Post - 8 September 1956
One last Post example of an identifiable car.  It is a 1954 Mercury with some distinctive side trim abaft of the door missing.  Placing all the camping stuff in front of the car also helps to disguise it.  The image's watermark is because this is a slightly cleaned-up cover by a poster-selling firm.

Saturday Evening Post - 3 October 1953
Now we show what was typical for the Post. The front of the car is somewhat like a 1950 Cadillac, but the rest is nondescript.

Saturday Evening Post - 4 August 1956
These cars look vaguely like early '50s General Motors models, but they lack brand identification ornamentation.

Saturday Evening Post - 8 December 1956
The cars pictured in this cover are totally contrived (though the side trim on the red car is similar to some 1956 Fords).

Saturday Evening Post - 15 November 1958
The wraparound windshield is similar to 1954-56 General Motors "C" body cars, but the rest of the car illustrated here is imaginary.

Saturday Evening Post - 21 May 1949
A totally imaginary design.  However, in the background is what looks like a Jeep station wagon.

Saturday Evening Post - 1 August 1959
The cars in the foreground are imaginary, but farther away I notice shapes and trim that remind me of mid-50s production cars. But their images are so tiny and partial that it doesn't matter.

Saturday Evening Post - 5 January, 1952
I used this Coby Whitmore cover in another Art Contrarian post. Whitmore was a total car guy and knew full well what different brands looked like. But had to come up with his own designs here.

Read More

About Blogging

I wrote this as a Facebook posting, but thought it might be of interest to you. I also posted this on my other blog, Art Contrarian.

It was almost exactly 12 years ago that I got involved with blogging.   Since then I’ve written more than 2000 blog posts.

The first blog for me was the late, lamented (because it was pretty popular) 2Blowhards blog.   The guy running it was Ray Sawhill who wrote bylined articles on art and culture for Newsweek magazine in the 1980s and 90s.  Ray blogged using the nom-du-blog “Michael Blowhard” in order to maintain separation from his Newsweek day job.  The other Blowhard was “Friedrich von Blowhard,” a Princeton buddy of Ray’s based in Los Angeles.

The blogging software they used was primitive by today’s standards — an important defect being that post drafts couldn’t be stockpiled for later publication scheduling.  That meant each post had to go live shortly after it was written.  That put strain on the bloggers who wanted content flowing at the rate of one or two posts per day in order to keep readers interested and returning to see what was new.

So for some reason Ray pulled me from the commenter ranks to full-time 2Blowhards blogger to ease the load on the original 2.  Except that I posted using my actual name.

At first, I was worried that I could maintain a reasonably high rate of posting.  I knew I had perhaps a dozen really nice items that I could write up, but after that?  You see, I recalled what happened when old vaudeville stars such as Eddie Cantor first appeared in TV “specials.”   They used the good stuff that they’d honed over decades on stage, so their first show would be a wowser.   After that, in future specials, their material wasn’t nearly as good due to lack of testing.

So I resolved to hold back on my so-called good stuff and write what came to mind each day.   And it worked.   As far as I recall, I never used up the “good stuff.”

Here’s the deal.  Be sure to blog on topics you know something about.   Then you must stay alert and notice things related to those subjects that might serve as hooks for posts.  It’s even better if you can relate whatever it might be to similar or opposite examples, because that can make for a deeper, more interesting post.  Apparently, it’s a special skill set: Ray Sawhill once told me that he thought I was “a natural blogger.”

Eventually, after his Newsweek buyout, Sawhill tired of 2Blowhards and turned it over to me.   I carried on for a few months and finally decided to strike out on my own.  My first blog, Art Contrarian, debuted in 2010.  It is based on the idea that modernism in art was an experiment that largely failed.  More interesting work had been done by more traditional painters in the late 1800s and early 1900s.   Illustration, architecture and industrial design are other subjects I treat.

I’ve always been interested in automobile styling, so in 2013 I started Car Style Critic blog.   I post two articles per week on each blog and maintain a backlog of two or three months’ worth of post drafts.  Readership for each blog is several hundred page views daily, which is good enough for me.

Read More