Prior to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Saint Louis Art Museum was in talks with the Victoria and Albert Museum to bring a traveling exhibition exploring car culture to St. Louis. That plan was scrapped as the pandemic impacted cultural institutions around the world, but the idea of exploring automobiles alongside art stuck with Genevieve Cortinovis, SLAM’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundaion associate curator of decorative arts and design.
“We weren’t going to do [the original] car show. That ship had sailed,” Cortinovis says. “But we thought about what kind of slice we could do and decided to focus on France between the wars and really get kind of granular in terms of period and geography, but think expansively about this large creative ecosystem and how the automobile impacted artists and designers and how artists and designers impacted the automobile.”
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The result of that decision is Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939, which opens to the public on April 12 and runs through July 27. Curated by Cortinovis alongside research assistant Sarah Berg and automobile expert Ken Gross, Roaring offers a bit of everything. Car enthusiasts will enjoy a sampling of 12 vintage vehicles, while the fashion-obsessed can peruse a sampling of evening wear, sportswear, and other items from both unknown and renowned designers. Familiar names such as Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Le Corbusier, and Man Ray fill out the visual art offerings. History and film buffs will both appreciate archive footage and clips from L’Inhumaine and Josephine Baker’s Princess Tam Tam.
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The exhibition’s six galleries—which are arranged in reverse order from what frequent visitors to the museum’s special exhibitions may be used to—lead visitors through the story of the automobile as art from their beginnings as “brutal machines” to cars that bring to mind elements of science fiction. Stops along the way focus on forays into the avant-garde, transcending the traditional lines between art and craft, mobilizing the people of France, and a section on “Women at the Wheel,” which highlights Josephine Baker and Hellé Nice.
A pair of audacious women with a shared love for vehicles—one for their style, the other for their speed—Baker and Nice invite comparison, but their stories differ drastically. “I like having a moment to really contrast two ideas of the French modern woman,” says Cortinovis of the section, which features vehicles indicative of each woman alongside examples of fashions, magazine covers, and engaging archival footage.
Throughout the exhibition, an accompanying audio guide offers insight into Roaring’s 100-plus objects from SLAM director Min Jung Kim, Cortinovis, Gross, and others. Particularly engaging are Gross’ descriptions of the exhibition’s vehicles—stunning examples of design and engineering produced by Bugatti, Citröen, Voisin, Figoni, and others.
Gross speaks with authority on, and perhaps more notably, clear appreciation for these cars and the fashion they inspired. A car expert raised by a fashion-designer father, Gross is uniquely positioned to comment on Roaring’s offerings.
“[Roaring] is the 15th exhibition of mine where we’ve put cars in a fine art museum, and I’ve always wanted to have the fashion component,” Gross says. “[Cortinovis] has done that brilliantly. There are a lot of moving parts and piece here, and I’m just very proud to be a small part of it.”
Visitors will get their first chance to see what the museum has put together for Roaring at a public review for the exhibition on Friday, April 11 from 4–8 p.m. A limited number of free tickets will be on offer for the exhibition during the event, which will also include a cash bar and live music from Joe Park and the Hot Club of St. Louis and Janet Evra in Sculpture Hall.
For tickets and more information on Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939, visit slam.org.
