The Aesthete
People sometimes ask me what are the rules of aesthetics. I snort and say there are none. Or rather just one. Just as Heraclitus said the only constant is change, so the only certainty in aesthetics is that tastes change. What is valued in one generation is reviled in the next. Until it is rediscovered, when it becomes valuable again. This applies to great art and writing. Many of painting’s Old Masters were unknown until the 19th Century. In the 18th Century, Shakespeare was thought a rustic barbarian. The same wobbly rules apply to car design.
Think of chrome, now rehabilitated after years in disgrace. To demonstrate its triviality, Colin Chapman once said: ‘If it doesn’t work, we chromium-plate it.’ Like so much in the history of car design, chrome has its origins with Harley Earl, Detroit’s wizard of kitsch who brought the queasy glamour of Hollywood to the industrial Mid-West: he had once been a neighbour of Cecil B DeMille.
Beginning in 1927, Earl introduced General Motors to what he called ‘Art and Color’. Hitherto brightwork on cars had been nickel electroplating. But somewhere in the prehistoric depths of his dinosaur id, Earl realised that chromium-plating offered more aesthetic opportunities. Chrome is hard, shiny and suggests prosperity. It reflects light, it energises. In his Ballad of Faith, a 1954 poem, William Carlos Williams wrote ‘No dignity without chromium’. That was American taste of the day.
And in that same year, when DuPont’s most popular colour for automobile paint was salmon pink – even if beige tuna was America’s favourite fish – Earl’s most extravagant experiments with chrome were begun. Simultaneously, white pigment had become so stable that two-tone colour schemes could exploit dramatic contrasts. To these, Earl added chrome not as fine accent but as a third element in body art. A chrome vocabulary evolved in GM’s studios: they spoke of a ‘Sweep-spear’ and a ‘Blitzline’.
Then chrome retreated. Detroit began to notice that Italian cars featured chrome only modestly. By the launch of the Ford Sierra in 1982, advanced car design did not feature chrome at all. And two-tone had disappeared from the designers’ aesthetic options. But following the inevitability of taste’s recu
