Roaring
Before we headed off to France, we spent a week in St. Louis - actually, the most-excellent suburb of Kirkwood, where Craig and Annie and Clara and Henry live. As always, we had a great time - ate like monarchs, saw cool things, did fun stuff. One especially excellent activity was a visit to the St. Louis Art Museum, to see an exhibition of great interest to us.
A word or two about the St. Louis Art Museum (also know as SLAM): it is a great museum, especially for a smaller city like St. Louis. It has an excellent permanent collection and puts on many exhibits that cover a wide range of interests. It’s free! Special exhibits are not expensive! You can buy cocktails in the small cafeteria! We’ve been to SLAM quite a few times and try to visit it every time we’re in St. Louis.
This trip the museum had a particularly appropriate exhibit for us: “Roaring: Art, Fashion and the Automobile in France, 1919 - 1939.” The premise of this exhibit is that over those two decades France was the design leader of the world, and that automobiles led design in art and fashion. As automobiles changed from boxy means of transportation to works of art, fashion and art followed. This was the start of the Art Deco period of design and the exhibit shows examples of automobiles that went from kind of boxy to pure Art Deco, and art and fashion followed.
In 2021 we visited a museum in Mulhouse, France that had the most amazing private collection of automobiles - over 500 on display. That collection specialized in Bugattis, and had two of these. A current estimate of their value - based on auctions - is $42 million each. The Bugatti Royale is 21 ft long, weighs 7,000 pounds(!) and is powered by a 778 cubic inch engine. Seven Royales were built, of which six still exist, the seventh having been destroyed in a crash — I wonder if the insurance paid off on that claim. This one’s permanent home is in the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit.
I would gladly accept either of these cars if someone were to offer them to me as gifts. These were my two favorites in the exhibit. I can’t imagine what they’re worth, but certainly in the $multi-millions.
The premise of “Roaring” is that automobile design was the leading edge of design in general. To show that, the exhibit showed some fashions and some art that reflected the changes.
The 1920s and 1930s were terrible years for France in many ways. The country had lost 1.4 million soldiers in a war that gained them almost nothing. The economy slowly sank over these two decades. Almost everyone became poorer. Yet France led the way in the world of automobile design, art and fashion in those two decades. This exhibit showed France leading the way in those three areas. Another success for the St. Louis Art Museum.