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1952 Chrysler D'Elegance: the one-off icon that made cars exciting again
Pick a decade, any decade, and your mind will immediately conjure up style signifiers of the era – clothes, hairstyles, cars, or whatever else you are into. We like to think of these different blocks of time, but obviously you can’t really slice things up that cleanly. It is not as if everyone gets together on New Year’s Eve at the end of the decade and says: “Right, the party’s over, time to get a haircut”.
But it is a useful psychological shorthand, and it might help explain why the car pictured here is so highly valued. Very briefly, and with an oversimplification that I hope you will forgive: in the 1930s Chrysler made some very exciting cars; in the 1940s there was a world war to worry about; in the 1950s Chrysler made boring cars, until this one made it change tack.
The Chrysler D’Elegance is a one-off car that was displayed for the first time at the Paris Motor Show in 1952. Show cars are often little more than that – a designer’s dream, a fancy that never flies anywhere. And often one that never even drives anywhere, as not all show cars are not lucky enough to get an engine.
This Chrysler is not like that. Not only is it a fully working car that has a monstrous V8 engine, but it also marks a significant step in the development of production cars.
In the middle of the century Chrysler had developed a reputation for making cars that were capable but a little dull. And as this was the time that the US was beginning the warm-up laps for a period of heady post-war prosperity, the last thing people wanted was dullness, and Chrysler’s market share suffered. Then the company made a smart move.
Chrysler hired a super-talented young designer called Virgil Exner. He was a car enthusiast who had trained as an artist before going into automobile design. He had earlier designed the 1947 Studebaker Starlight coupe, one of the most audacious cars the US public had seen.
When Exner came to Chrysler, he fought to take control of the creative process. The lack of spark that the cars were suffering from stemmed from the fact, as Exner saw it, that the engineers had been given too much of a say over how cars were made. The result of this was cars that went well, but didn’t get you going.
At this time, several US car makers were employing the services of Italian coachbuilders, and Exner decided to consult with Pininfarina, before settling on Ghia to craft into metal his designs for a series of “idea cars”.
Whether or not you find the D’Elegance beautiful is a matter of taste, but it is certainly striking, and you would have to be unhinged to find it boring.
By the mid-1950s Chrysler released its “Forward Look” series, a new range of production cars that inherited many features from the D’Elegance, like the grill and the tail-lights. The cars looked like they had been created by the swoosh of an artist’s pencil, rather than by a group of men who were good at doing sums.
This design influence was felt beyond America. Ghia designers liked the D’Elegance so much that they flattered it by producing some suspiciously similar styling details on one of their next cars, the hugely successful and staggeringly beautiful Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia.
The Chrysler D’Elegance was a big help in making cars exciting again. It was part of the shift towards cars that were not just pieces of engineering, they were what Exner called “art made practical”.
The D’Elegance is a reminder of a great time for Chrysler, but also for the car industry as whole. And it could only have come from one decade: the 1950s.
The 1952 Chrysler D’Elegance by Ghia is Lot 128 in the RM Sotheby’s New York Icons sale on Wednesday December 6th 2017. Estimate $900,000 - $1,100,000. rmsothebys.com