June 02, 2003 - This year’s Eyes on Design Automotive Exhibit will present 75 years of General Motors Design with a big display at the GM Design Center in Warren, Michigan on June 22. The exhibit will feature concept vehicles from the 1938 Buick Y-Job to the 2003 Cadillac Sixteen.

The event will open with a brunch presentation by Wayne Cherry, GM's fifth head of design, who will retire this autumn. Car Design News expects that the name of the sixth will be announced during the presentations, and will, in the weeks leading up to the anniversary, celebrate the five men who have carried GMs very distinct design torch, and have contributed to a remarkable consistency. First man out is, of course, Harley Earl.

The story about how Harley Earl was invited to create GM's Art and Color Section – after being spotted by Don Lee, Cadillac’s West Coast distributor who noticed Earls coachbuilding/designing skills when the heir to the Earl Automobile Works promised he could make any Chevrolet look like a Cadillac – is well known these days. After all, that was what started the car industry's in-house design and styling departments.

But less well know is that five years earlier, in 1923, the GM board asked the brilliant engineer, Charles Kettering, to establish a Paint and Enamel Committee, which – it might be argued, was an important weapon in bringing down the Ford Model T. So maybe we should name Alfred P. Sloan, the General Motors general, as the originator of production car design and styling?

But at least Harley Earl was his brilliant instrument to put in practise Sloan’s famous dictum of “A car for every purse and purpose”. Born in 1893, he had an engineering background, from Stanford, but worked in his father’s factory where he switched production to motorcar bodies, mainly for movie work and personalities. Don Lee bought the Earl operation, and a very lucrative partnership it proved to be during the twenties. The unique Earl technique of modelling his proposed coach-built bodies in clay and displaying them was one of the details that caught the eye of Fred Fisher, president of Cadillac and of the Fisher Body family. He asked Earl to submit proposals for a new cheap Cadillac, the LaSalle that was to debut in 1927. He drew on Hispano Suiza bodies, and the reception in Detroit was such that he was invited back and offered a position as head of a new department.

By May he started recruiting, and talents that had been employed by the coachbuilding industry all over the United States came forward, and by January 1928 the Art and Color section counted some 50 persons. And from that time one of the great GM design traditions could be observed. Other factories tapped GM for designers, GM hardly ever hired designers from other manufacturers. The GM design staff came from schools, universities, inside the company or from other branches. But once inside, you became hot property when the competitors went hiring.

It will of course be impossible to list all his accomplishments here, but there is an excellent site at www.carofthecentury.com where you will find excerpts from a photo exhibit titled 'Automotive Hollywood', last displayed in Michigan at the Art Center of Kettering University.

But we might remember Harley Earl here as one of the sharpest dressers in the business, he was the epitome of what the magazine Esquire defined as Style, he is reputed to have been a very bad communicator, and did not have (or display) a good visual technique. Some testimonials: “He wasn’t a designer, but he was the finest critic of designs”. “He was a pioneer in aesthetics, originality and experimentation”. “His war cry was ‘Give us something new’ but he was very careful about too radical ideas”. He used his stern personality to direct and administrate, and his formidable authority increased when he became a GM Vice President in 1937. That was when his department was renamed Styling Division. This he celebrated by creating the world’s first concept car, the Y-Job of 1938 which carried the fingerprints of George Snyder, one of the first who gave “organic” a meaning in car design parlance.

Harley Earl recruited a surplus of available talent during the depression, Gordon Buehrig, Frank Hershey and Bill Mitchell to name but a few. But even if some of these not only had enormous talents but also outsize egos, Harley Earl managed to keep his position until 1958, when he handed over to flamboyant Bill Mitchell. Then he could look back on not only a GM at the pinnacle of Car Design and Style, or an organisation faithfully duplicating Alfred Sloan’s “Coordinated decentralisation”, but also on what I regard as his greatest and longest lasting memento: the GM Technical Center. Opened May 16, 1956, designed by the father and son architectural team of Elien and Eero Saarinen following Earl's brief about the “Versailles of the industry” (recent GM ads hailed him as the “da Vinci of Detroit”, that’s even more over the top) and dominated by Antoine Pevsner’s big oxidized black bronze sculpture, placed right outside the office-windows of Harley Earl. Inside you found, and still will find, a who's who of contemporary (fifties that is) artists: Mullen, Squier, McCormick, Gwen Lux and Gere Kavanaugh – it’s like Harley Earl wanted to bring back at least the Art, and also, partly, the Color of his starting point nearly 30 years earlier.

It cannot be a coincidence that when he handed over control of GM Design, he not only left behind him the biggest, most coherent design department of the industry, but he also switched off a source of inspiration. All observers agree that this also marked the end of “excesses” (not spoken in a derisive way here) in car design.

Eyes on Design website: www.eyesondesign.com

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