From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Genevieve Cortinovis of the Saint Louis Art Museum explains how the Bugatti 57C Vanvooren, created in 1939, combines luxury, horsepower and sensuous design to almost anthropomorphic effect – and what this tells us about our relationship with technology in the years before the Second World War.
The arrival of the automobile in the 19th century changed the way people travelled forever. Journeys were made quicker and easier and the car itself became a signifier of status, taste and wealth. While the story of cars begins in Germany, with Mercedes-Benz creating the first motor-powered vehicle in 1886, it was the French who harnessed their knowledge of carriage-building to make cars more powerful, beautiful and comfortable. Up to the mid 20th century, France was a leader in the development of the car and, though by the early 20th century it was out-produced by the United States, manufacturing and technological innovation continued steadily, with many companies vying for success on the racetrack and in the luxury market. A pioneering figure in the industry was the Italian engineer Ettore Bugatti, who spent most of his life in France. In 1909, after working for various carmakers, he moved from Cologne to the city of Molsheim in Alsace, where he founded Automobiles Ettore Bugatti. It soon became one of the most celebrated manufacturers of luxury cars in the world.
Ettore was the son of the designer Carlo Bugatti and his early life in a creative household undoubtedly informed his career. He traced aspects of his approach to automobile design and construction to his father: in The Bugatti Story (1967), written by Ettore’s daughter L’Ébé, he is quoted saying ‘In a short while, just by looking at the machine [a motor-tricycle], I had grasped all the intricacies of its mechanism […] My father attached great importance to his two sons being able to work with their hands, and a cabinetmaker’s work is the best of groundings for mechanics.’
The car on these pages is a Bugatti 57C Vanvooren, created in 1939. Ettore and his son Jean – who like his father was artistically minded as well as being a mechanical genius – originated the idea for the Type 57 in the early 1930s. With the Great Depression hitting France in earnest and luxury automobile sales suffering, they decided that they needed an exciting new model. The 57 is that model, becoming, as automobile historian H.G. Conway wrote, ‘the most celebrated non-racing car Bugatti ever produced’. Unlike the automobiles that we have today, these are custom coach-built cars. So rather than buying a factory model, buyers had the opportunity to order a rolling chassis, including the engine and drivetrain – from a manufacturer and then select their preferred coachbuilder, or carrossier, to construct a custom body. This was typical of many luxury coach brands at the time, such as Delahaye, Hispano-Suiza and Rolls-Royce. You could even have custom bodies on a Citroën or Peugeot if you wanted. Here, Bugatti is the maker of the engine and the chassis. Vanvooren, a French coachbuilder, designed and created the body, but in the style of Figoni et Falaschi, one of the pre-eminent coachbuilders of the era.
The grated headlamps of the Bugatti 57C ‘Shah’. Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Peter Harholdt
The coachbuilder would design every component of the interior and exterior of the car. They would have dealt with so many different materials and craftspeople, bringing together custom textiles, leathers, chrome, designs for handles, windscreens, bumpers, headlamps. Most sizeable coachbuilders procured the materials and constructed the interior and upholstery in house rather than subcontracting, with exceptions for speciality finishes like eggshell lacquer and instrumentation. They also came up with things like adjustable seats and other innovations we might now take for granted: gloveboxes, mirrors that pop down so you can touch up your make-up – efficient designs that catered to specific consumers and made the car a home on wheels. The windscreen on this car, for example, a Figoni innovation, could completely retract into the cowl.
This car is the pinnacle of the voluptuous custom coach-built French cars of the ’30s. The ‘C’ stands for compressor, which is a supercharged engine – it’s a powerful car. It is also one of a kind – in some cases, Type 57s have completely different bodies, either for touring or racing: next to each other, you might not even know they were the same model. This one was made as a gift from the French government to the Prince of Persia, the future Shah of Iran, to celebrate his marriage to Princess Fawzia of Egypt. During this period, many countries were trying to gain favour with Iran, with its large oil resources and this gift was a way of sustaining a friendly relationship. It’s interesting looking at footage of the wedding and seeing all the participating countries, the military parades, knowing of the chaos to come. Nationalism permeated the interwar luxury automobile industry, with once warring countries vying for supremacy on the racetrack and for customers at the annual auto salons.
The French were in a hurry to have this car made and went to Figoni to ask if he could build the body, but he didn’t have capacity. So they asked Vanvooren to make one in the style of a Figoni. The fact that it is a Figoni-style body made by a separate coachbuilder is interesting because it underscores the idea that though these cars require an astounding amount of specialised labour – Richard Adatto, an authority on French car-making, has surmised that a fully custom body required about 2,200 hours to complete – in capable hands, they were ultimately replicable. This was certainly a very lavish gift. Rumour has it that the British sometimes called Figoni et Falaschi ‘Phoney and Flashy’, so there was also a sense that they indulged in these extremely sensuous, over-the-top designs. For a long time, only heads of states, royals or aristocrats could afford cars like this. A Bugatti catalogue from May 1938 lists the price of the Type 57C chassis as 90,000 francs, already a hefty sum without the coachwork and the Henry Ford Museum estimated the historic price of their 1931 Bugatti Type 41 Royale convertible with coachwork by Weinberger at $43,000, comparing it to an average wage of $1,388 per year. In 1959, the car was sold out of the Shah’s Imperial Garage. It had a succession of owners before it was bought by the Petersen Automobile Museum, which has loaned it to the Saint Louis Art Museum for this exhibition.
The interior of the Bugatti 57C ‘Shah’, including a glovebox and a retractable windscreen, both of which were recent innovations. Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Peter Harholdt
To create a body like this, you would first make a full-size wire maquette of the body followed by wood model, or buck, that metalworkers could use as a mould. At the same time, carpenters constructed the car’s wood frame or skeleton over which the metal panels would be attached. Some of these cars are aluminium, some are steel-bodied. The interior upholstery could be leather, leatherette or fabric. At the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes of 1925, coachbuilders presented luxurious interiors sheathed in eggshell and lacquer and precious wood marquetry. A variety of different metals would be used, with trims in chrome or nickel: nickel has a warmer hue, while chrome is bluer. After the First World War, a new kind of nitrocellulose paint was introduced, which had a very lustrous, fast-drying finish. Bugatti used this new paint to create two-toned cars; earlier, at the 1925 Paris expo, Sonia Delaunay and Maurice Dufrêne presented cars with polychrome patterned exteriors. The taste for exuberant art deco paint jobs didn’t exactly take off, but this idea that cars can be colourful lived on into the 1930s.
I love how the chrome accents, called brightwork, are handled. They gently swell and taper, with an almost liquid quality. The long engine vents rake along the car like whiskers, their functionality decreasing as they extend across its side doors. The way the chrome on the bottom of the car travels up and down in peaks and waves emphasises the dramatic slope of the fenders. When the windscreen of the car is lowered, the line of the car is seamless. In motion, its sleek whiskers both visually lighten the enveloping body and suggest frictionless speed. The swooping fender is a typical 1930s flourish; in that decade, you could still see these boxy cars, which gradually developed into this lower-slung, elongated, curving style. From the profile of the car, it looks like it would be difficult to drive because both the front and back wheels are enclosed by fender skirts, forming almost a complete shell. However, when you look at the car head on, you’ll notice that it is quite wide to accommodate the fenders and the wheel radius. From a distance, the car looks as if it’s hovering above the ground like an airplane ready to take flight. Even the door handles are completely flush with the body of the car, essentially becoming part of its skin.
Today, we don’t typically associate luxury automobiles with France; more with Germany or Italy. In the 1930s, though, they were competitive with all these different producers. Fashion magazines and the popular concours d’élégance positioned the car as an essential component of the fashionable ensemble of the ‘new woman’. The shared clientele and reliance on handcraft and customisation made couturiers and coachbuilders natural allies – in France you would talk about getting your car ‘dressed’ by a coachbuilder. Even Falaschi once said: ‘We really were true couturiers of automobile coachwork, dressing and undressing the chassis one, two, three times and even more before arriving at a definitive line.’ For the concours, especially in the late 1930s, you would see couturiers creating custom fashions for actresses and socialites who were attending – Josephine Baker was a great ‘voituriste’, and would often help brands present their new custom coach-built cars.
A profile view of the Bugatti 57C ‘Shah’, which shows its low-slung design and swooping fender. Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Peter Harholdt
The sometimes unsettlingly lifelike qualities of late ’30s automobiles makes the slippage between the dressing of a woman’s body and the dressing of a car’s chassis an engine for exploration. The exhibition situates this Bugatti and similar examples by Figoni in the context of biomorphic and Surrealist sculptures by Brancusi, Arp and Giacometti, considering these makers’ shared interest in capturing the vitality of nature in an industrial, technological world. In 1957, Giacometti was invited to visit the Salon de l’Automobile in Paris, where he responded to a question about whether cars could be considered sculptures. He said that he didn’t think they could, but went on to muse that the car ‘descends not only from the carriage but from the horse and carriage combined. The resulting product is certainly strange; a complete mechanical organism, having eyes, a mouth, a heart and intestines; it will eat and drink and go on working until it breaks – what an odd parody of a living being.’ This idea comes to a head in the 1930s with cars like this. They seem to encapsulate what historian of technology Gijs Mom described as the ‘cyborg experience’ of driving – a fusion between human and machine, linked physically, energetically, and also visually. It would have been a very new feeling.
As told to Lucy Waterson.
Genevieve Cortinovis is associate curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
‘Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939’ is at the Saint Louis Art Museum from 12 April to 27 July.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.