Ransom Center Magazine

design

High Museum of Art’s “Dream Cars” exhibition features drawings, designs from Norman Bel Geddes collection

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“We dream of cars that will float or fly, or run on energy from a laser beam, or travel close to the ground without wheels. Such research may border on the fantastic, but so did the idea of a carriage going about the country without a horse.” –The Ford Book of Styling, 1963

 

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is currently hosting the exhibition Dream Cars through September 7, which includes items from the Ransom Center’s Norman Bel Geddes collection. The exhibition showcases the innovative and artistic design of rare vehicles from the early 1930s to 2010 and encompasses the evolution of the automobile from a horseless carriage to a sleek, highly functional speed machine. Dream Cars highlights designs and models from across Europe and the United States, including a blueprint, a photograph, and three drawings of Bel Geddes’s 1932 design, Motorcar No. 9.

 

The exhibition brings together 17 concept cars, including designs from Ferrari, Bugatti, General Motors, and Porsche. These vehicles are paired with conceptual drawings, patents, and scale models to demonstrate how imaginative designs and innovation changed the automobile from a basic, functional object to a symbol of limitless possibilities.

 

None of the vehicles and designs on display in this exhibition were ever intended for production. Rather, they represent the “dream” of future possibilities and highlight the talent and imagination of industrial designers.

 

Bel Geddes was an American theatrical and industrial designer who gained fame in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. The Motorcar No. 9 model demonstrates his expertise in aerodynamics and streamlining as a means to modernism. The Ransom Center’s extensive Norman Bel Geddes archive includes a model of Motorcar No. 9 among other papers, designs, and artifacts that span 50 years.

 

Related content:

Video: Curator of Norman Bel Geddes exhibition discusses influence of the industrial designer

 

Please click on the thumbnails below to view larger images.

 

Now open at the Wolfsonian: “I Have Seen The Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America”

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The exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America is now open at the Wolfsonian at Florida International University in Miami Beach, Florida.  Pulled mostly from the Ransom Center’s Bel Geddes archive, the exhibition originated in fall 2012 at the Ransom Center and was on view earlier this year at the Museum of the City of New York. Bringing together some 200 unique drawings, models, photographs, and films, this exhibition highlights Bel Geddes’s creativity and desire to transform American society through design.

 

Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958) was an industrial and theatrical designer who gained fame in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s for his streamlined and futuristic innovations. His designs played a significant role in shaping America’s image as an innovative powerhouse and global leader into the future. One of his most famous undertakings was the unforgettable Futurama exhibition at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair.

 

I Have Seen the Future is on view at the Wolfsonian until September 28.

 

Image: Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933.

 

Related content:

View the Norman Bel Geddes Designs America book

Curator of Norman Bel Geddes exhibition discusses influence of the industrial designer

Read an inside look at Bel Geddes’s design, Motorcar Number 9

Fellows Find: Fleur Cowles archive sheds light on woman behind pioneering magazine “Flair”

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Scholar Teal Triggs works with materials in the Fleur Cowles archive in the Ransom Center's Reading Room. Photo by Alicia Dietrich.
Scholar Teal Triggs works with materials in the Fleur Cowles archive in the Ransom Center’s Reading Room. Photo by Alicia Dietrich.

 


Teal Triggs is a Professor of Graphic Design and Associate Dean at Royal College of Art, London. She spent time at the Ransom Center over the summer exploring materials related to Fleur Cowles with funding from the Fleur Cowles Endowment Fund. She shares some of her findings here.

 

With the support of the Fleur Cowles Endowment Fund, I was able to spend two weeks at the Harry Ransom Center exploring the personal archive of the journalist, painter, and American socialite Fleur Cowles (1908–2009). As a graphic design historian, my research has focused on the significance of the early 1950s American publication Flair magazine (1950–1951), created and edited by Cowles. The magazine ran for only 12 issues (with a limited-run, 5,000-copy, pre-publication prototype printed in September 1949), yet its influence would continue long after its closure. Whilst the Cowles archive at the Ransom Center is not specifically about Flair, it does contain related materials that provide useful insights into Fleur Cowles’s extensive social network, her commitment to the arts, and importantly for me, her working methods as a writer and editor.

 

Flair was very much a product of its time, simultaneously created as a response to the growth of specialist magazines and a nod to the new medium of television. As Cowles writes: “I wanted a magazine with ultimate dual reader appeal, male as well as female. And, in the frameword (sic) of television’s allure, I wanted a magazine of extraordinary visual excitement.” Flair achieved this with its unorthodox and experimental die-cut covers, unusual paper stock, tipped-in booklets, and luxurious use of space featuring illustration and photography. Undoubtedly, her editorial vision—signified by a drawing of her trademark rose—pushed the conventions of printing technologies and magazine design. Cowles found this a “thrilling gamble.” The original photographs in the collection show her sourcing paper in Milan and capture her exuberance in creating a magazine that has “a sense of surprise, a joy of discovery, with each new reading.”

 

As an editor, Cowles fulfilled, but also shaped, her reader’s aspirations. Flair was ultimately a reflection of Cowles’s own “jet-setting” lifestyle, with features on society’s elite, Hollywood celebrities, and exotic travel. The magazine featured those she knew and places she herself had visited, while often showcasing the contributions made by women with careers in politics. Flair was also a space where she expanded on her interest in design, with stories on interiors, architecture, and fashion. The archive material also shows that whilst Fleur promoted a stylized femininity, she was indeed a pioneer in promoting the role and careers of women in journalism and publishing.

 

Other documents in the collection clarify Cowles’s motivations. Before editing Flair, she was an Associate Editor at Look magazine—a publication owned by her then-husband “Mike” Gardner Cowles. One document that reveals Cowles’s commitment to gender equality is found in a speech she gave to the University of Syracuse and Syracuse Advertising and Sales Club on May 5, 1950. The title of her talk “The Woman in Publishing,” brought a decidedly feminist perspective to America’s publishing history, an aspect of her life I intend to explore further.

 

The opportunity to see the original magazines alongside supporting documents in the collection including letters, cards, telegrams, speeches, and manuscripts presented a rich context for my research, for which I am very grateful, and which will eventually appear in a book about Cowles’s impact on design.

 

Related content:

Publisher, author and artist Fleur Cowles’s archive donated to Ransom Center

Video: Fleur Cowles describes her artwork

Fleur’s Fleurs: “Flower Game” reveals friends and their favorite flowers

Slideshow: Cover art and designs of Flair magazine