Sixteen European autos from Ralph Lauren's collection go on display at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts

01:00 AM EST on Thursday, March 3, 2005

BY BILL VAN SICLEN
Journal Arts Writer

BOSTON -- Buckle up, art fans. The Museum of Fine Arts, an institution known more for Monets and Renoirs than motors and rotors, is taking a road trip.

The occasion is "Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection," an exhibit of 16 classic sports and touring cars on loan from fashion designer and avid car enthusiast Ralph Lauren. Highlights include a 1938 Alfa Romeo "Mille Miglia," a 1955 Jaguar XKD and a 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa.

The show, opening Sunday for a four-month run, also features two cars that often run neck-and-neck in debates over the most beautiful sports car ever made: the 1933 Bugatti "Type 59" Grand Prix and the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing Coupe.

"It really is an amazing collection," says curator Darcy Kuronen. "When you walk through the galleries, you almost have to pinch yourself to remember that many of these cars actually spent time on the racetrack. They may look like sculptures on wheels -- and in many ways they are sculptures on wheels -- but they're also functioning race cars."

At the same time, the show arrives in Back Bay with at least a few dings in its fenders.

One criticism is that by focusing on a single high-profile collection, the museum is providing a Hummer's worth of free publicity to Lauren and his fashion business. It's a charge Kuronen readily concedes -- up to a point.

"Is this great P.R. for Ralph Lauren? Absolutely," says Kuronen. "But give the man his due: He has a great eye for design, and the money and motivation to go after the very best cars. If we'd simply put out the word that the MFA was interested in doing a car show, I don't think we could have done any better."

Kuronen also points out that Lauren didn't contribute any money to the show, which is sponsored by Merrill Lynch. That, he says, puts the MFA on stronger ethical ground than New York's Guggenheim Museum, which accepted $15 million from fashion designer Giorgio Armani to mount its "Giorgio Armani: A Retrospective" exhibit in 2000.

Critics miss point

Another knock is that the cars, all of which have been buffed to a high, rust-free sheen, are too perfectly preserved to qualify as real-world automobiles. Instead, they're more like motorized objets d'art, an impression the MFA's Gund Gallery installation reinforces by presenting each car on its own elevated platform.

But Kuronen says such complaints miss the point.

"At one time, all these cars were working cars, in the sense that people owned them, drove them and raced them," he says. "The fact that they've now become collector's items and are too expensive to take out for a Sunday spin shouldn't be held against them. They're like thoroughbreds that have been put out to pasture."

Kuronen, a soft-spoken scholarly type who looks as if he spends more time reading books than watching NASCAR races, is also ready for the hoary "Sure they're hot, but are these cars really art?" question.

"Absolutely, they're art," he insists. "Think of all the things museums collect -- not just paintings and sculptures but furniture, clothing, textiles, ceramics.

"As objects that express the highest standards of design, craftsmanship and individual vision, these cars can hold their own with anything else in the museum."

Great modern sculpture

Certainly, "Speed, Style, and Beauty" makes a strong case for the automobile, at least in its most refined and rarefied form, as an object of esthetic appreciation.

Indeed, it's hard to stand in front the 1930 Mercedes-Benz "Count Trossi" SSK, a stunning all-black touring car that looks like the Batmobile's great-great-grandfather, or the 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, a svelte little number known to movie buffs as the kind of car James Dean was driving when he suffered his fatal 1955 crash, and not feel you're in the presence of some of the best modern sculpture ever made.

That most of these "sculptures" could blow the hubcaps off almost anything on the road today is just icing on the automotive cake.

The designers, too, were a colorful bunch, ranging from the flamboyant Italian carmaker Enzo Ferrari to the reclusive Ettore Bugatti, a quiet visionary whose cars were designed and built in France. At their best, these artist-engineers pushed the practical demands of car-building into the realm of fine art.

"That's something that I think comes through strongly in the catalog," Kuronen says, referring to the lavishly illustrated tome that accompanies the exhibition and provides background material on all the cars and designers. "These weren't corporate designers trying to find a new market niche. People like Benz, Ferrari and Bugatti operated more like artists and artisans than businessmen."

Yet it's also clear that despite their sexy curves and stylish details, these cars are, first and foremost, machines -- insanely rare, absurdly expensive and impossibly glamorous machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless.

In fact, some of the cars' most distinctive design features are the result of practical, not esthetic considerations.

The prominent shark-like fin on the back of the 1955 Jaguar XKD, for example, was added to control steering at high speeds. That fin shapes eventually became purely decorative elements -- notably on 1950s Chryslers and Cadillacs -- only shows how one era's technical advance becomes another era's style statement.

Similarly, the hatch-like doors that give the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 500SL Gullwing Coupe its distinctive silhouette were a response to the car's innovative space-frame construction. Since the car's steel-tube-reinforced frame left no room for traditional side doors, designers installed doors that opened upward, thereby creating one of the most unusual profiles in automotive history.

Racing colors

Even something as seemingly arbitrary as paint color turns out to serve a practical purpose. According to Kuronen, in the early years of European auto racing, the sport's governing bodies assigned different colors to each nation. That way, it was easy for spectators to tell a French car (typically painted powder-blue) from an Italian car (fire-engine red) and both from an English car (dark green).

Eventually, these national racing colors became so deeply ingrained that even today "British Racing Green" is the default hue for British-made sports cars, just as red and silver are for Italian and German cars, respectively.

Black, on the other hand, is the color of choice for the show's big European touring cars, whether it's the elegant 1938 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic Coupe, a car with more genuine star power than most of the celebrities on display at last Sunday's Academy Awards, or the one-of-a-kind 1930 Mercedes-Benz "Count Trossi," a car whose swooping trunk and rear fenders suggest the back of a giant Black Widow spider.

The "Count Trossi" is also one of the few cars in the exhibit where looks were at least as important as performance. Its owner, Count Carlo Felice Trossi, was a dashing Italian nobleman and race-car driver who customized the already-striking body of the Mercedes-Benz SSK, dramatically extending everything from the front engine cover to the rear fenders.

The result: a car that must have looked great blazing down a straightaway, but which would probably take most of us a week to parallel park.

Strictly European

As you may have guessed by now, "Speed, Style, and Beauty" is an all-European affair. (Sorry, Corvette fans.) Even so, it offers a fascinating look at the evolution of the sports car, beginning with the 1929 "Blower" Bentley, a massive automobile that's more tank than roadster, and ending with the 1996 McLaren F1, reputedly the fastest production-model sports car (top speed: 230 mph) ever built. (The term "blower," by the way, refers to an early form of turbocharger.)

At the same time, many viewers may find themselves lingering over cars from the middle part of the 20th century -- a period when breathtaking designs and groundbreaking technical innovations seemed to go hand in hand.

In fact, the question on most visitors' lips probably won't be "Are cars art?" but "Where have all the great car designers gone?"

Compared with today's plain-vanilla sedans and boxy SUV's, the cars on display in Boston are testaments to a time when speed, style and sexiness weren't considered mutually exclusive qualities. No wonder many of these cars have appeared in ad campaigns for Ralph Lauren fashions: they embody the same old-world glamour and romance that Lauren's fashion designs strive to capture.

Asked if he has a favorite car, Kuronen doesn't miss a beat.

"I'd take the Gullwing," he says. "It has everything: beauty, speed, grace. I wouldn't even have to drive it. I'd just worship it quietly in my garage."

"Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection" runs through July 3 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston.

Exhibit hours: Monday-Tuesday and Saturday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-4:45 p.m. and Wednesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-9:45 p.m.

Exhibit admission (including general admission): $22 adults; $20 students and seniors; $13 children 7-17 and free under 7. Tickets may be purchased by calling (617) 542-4632 or by visiting www.mfa.org. (Note: Admission to the exhibit is by reserved ticket only.)

For general information, including directions, call (617) 267-9300 or visit www.mfa.org