(1948 Kaiser-Frazer)
The automobile industry has historically been among the most prestigious and powerful industries for advertising firms to serve. To this day, “landing a car company” is a pretty big deal for most firms, as it brings a large amount of business and revenue. Today, most car companies divide their advertising among multiple firms, allowing for specialization across the various mediums, including print, TV, mobile, and social media. But that isn’t all that has changed over the years. As photography and digital techniques became more advanced, the once popular technique of painted automobile ads all but went away.
(1948 Dodge)
As a recent scholar of marketing and advertising, I’ve spent countless hours learning about what goes into a successful marketing strategy. Although print media is still an important component of many campaigns, it is increasingly becoming less integral, as its effectiveness pales in comparison to the interactiveness and sheer number of impressions that social and mobile media generate.
(1950 Plymouth)
With respect to that, looking at these vintage ads not only takes us back to a simpler time by way of their content, but by their mere existence as painted print ads. Unlike modern-day advertisements of any medium for any product, there’s a distinctive human quality about them. These earlier ones from the late-1940s and 1950s have a Norman Rockwell-esque look to them, literally painting a picture of nostalgic and simplistic post-WWII America, where peace, prosperity, and optimism are the best-remembered traits.
Rightfully so, Cadillac ads typically conveyed an aura of power, prestige, and affluence. This 1951 Cadillac has always been one of my favorites.
It’s best to view these ads in the context of their time. Some may exhibit a level of political incorrectness by today’s standards, but just like the what was acceptable in terms of design and safety features then, what was socially acceptable in past eras is significantly different from the present day.
Advertising is all about influencing the consumer, and there’s no denying that stretching of the truth sometimes occurs. In this case, it literally meant stretching the car to exaggerated proportions, which is exactly what the artists did to create the distinctive looks in many of these images. The team of Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman were responsible for many of these gouache painted General Motors ads of the 1960s, owing to their familiar looks.
Fitzpatrick was responsible for the cars, tracing individual sections at a time to create his signature “wide” look. Kaufman would handle the background and people, often using foreign locations and extravagant scenery to enhance to overall attention-grabbing quality of the ads.
In an interview with Motor Trend, Fitzpatrick stated, “I’ve always maintained that a picture of a car moving doesn’t mean a thing. They all move. You have to convey something about the car psychologically. It’s all about image. That’s the reason people buy cars.”
This 1964 Chrysler ad would appear to have been done by a different artist, due to its angle and slightly more abstract look.
Here’s another Fitzpatrick/Kaufman work, with their signature wide, exaggerated car look and exotic scenery. It seems like Pontiac used these gouache paintings more than any other brand, appearing the majority of their ads and brochures in the 1960s and early 1970s.
This 1973 Dodge ad stands out in that it depicts the subject car traveling at high speeds. It could be due to the quality of scan, but this advertisement appears to have a canvas-like quality to it, which also sets it apart from the other ads here.
As color photography improved, painted automobile ads began to quickly disappear in the 1970s. By the 1980s, they were virtually nonexistent. There were a few exceptions, like this series of 1988 Buick ads.
They certainly have a different, more modern look to them than the paintings of preceding decades, but these ads are still interesting, with their scenic backdrops and bright color schemes.
It is pointless to say that there haven’t been very many painted car advertisements in recent years, and I doubt we will every see them become popular again. Interactive ads, aimed at social media and mobile smart phones is in vogue, and print ads are taking a back seat, looking duller than ever in most respects. As someone currently looking for a job in advertising, it would be a dream of mine to work on a car account someday. I don’t think painted ads are the most effective way to go in this modern era, but at the very least, we can always look back at this golden age of automobile advertising.
The majority of these painted advertisements I found on the Vintage-Ad-Orama shop on Etsy, where they can be purchased. There’s quite a few more to check out.
I wonder if design schools are teaching these techniques any more (anyone at Art Center care to confirm?). Most of the illustration work I did in the Industrial Design program at Georgia Tech in the mid-1980s were marker renderings, usually using gauche (which we referred to as ‘guano’) only for highlights (‘farkles’). We’d also use prisma-color on colored paper.
I’m just finishing up my advertising degree, and despite not being an art director, I can say that they still make us creatives learn these analog techniques for our marker roughs. We generally don’t turn to Photoshop and illustrator until we’re ready to produce the work.
I definitely have to agree though, these vintage illustrated ads are beautiful. Very symbolic of the period’s style. Nice to see some copy in an ad for once!
A lost at, indeed.
If that brown Bonneville is painted with gouache I would love to know how he did it. In my experience, it’s a very unforgiving medium to work in, meaning, if you make a mistake corrections are difficult.
I’m thinking he must have airbrushed those glossy reflections on the hood. Gouache is quite difficult to blend as it dries quickly.
I don’t remember the name of the artist but the most stunningly beautiful manufacturer artwork has to be that for Mercedes in the 1950s – exotic cars like the 300 sedans, coupes, roadsters and of course the gullwing. Like Pontiac elegant settings and like Cadillac elegant people were also depicted. Mercedes had a history of fine illustrations in ads and brochures for automobiles going back to pre-war ’20s and ’30s fine cars.
The text of the Dodge ad misses the audience. Dodge buyers did NOT want excitement. But the artist made the correct point without words. Fluid Drive got you through snow.
The text compositor made the text even worse by putting “Dodge breaks down” at the top of the right side!
I am surprised that Lincoln never resurrected “smoothest car afloat” slogan for the final Town Cars. 🙂
I saw this one on Ebay UK. Looks like one of the last painting of VanKaufman and Fitzpatrick, showing a 1974 Opel Rekord.
Ironic that you lead with that “Production schedules doubled” Kaiser-Frazer ad. Once some of the postwar demand for new cars was sated, Henry Kaiser’s projections proved to be very over-optimistic.
Oh boy…close to my heart, Brendan. I own many of the ads you picture, in addition to at least a thousand more. I love collecting antique car ads almost as much as I like collecting the cars themselves. It’s been mentioned here before that Pontiac’s were usually the best, but by the 1960s, painted ads were on the way out anyway.
I rescued a couple of art brochures recently slightly moth eaten a friend was throwing them out, one for the new Volkswagen type 2 van pickup and the other for the new MK VII Hillman Minx I gave the VW one to a Kombi owning friend and kept the Hillman one, I was informed the VW brochure is rare and sought after world wide,bugga shoulda put it on trademe.
The ’57 Ford ad strikes me as odd with it’s stereotype-Injun imagery, since wasn’t that traditionally Pontiac’s thing?
Other ads are exactly on point for their brand, not just the ’51 Caddy from their multi-year series showing the Cadillac owners’ wife (or other consort…) in evening finery but also the ’80s Buick ads attempting to put a fresh spin on a traditional medium left for dead fifteen years before on its’ way to becoming the “traditional American luxury” division, and the Fitz and Van Pontiac ads that are synonymous with the brand’s glory days.
Stéphane’s Rekord is an odd one, a rare Fitz misstep in that he makes the car look flat-sided and dowdy. Opel should share the blame for commissioning a base two-door sedan with plain hubcaps though.
Indian villages used to be a big tourist trap “thing” in the ’60s when I was a kid – remember stopping at one in North Georgia on more than one family vacation trip.
Cowboys and Indians was hot in the 1950s.
I remember seeing a DeSoto wagon ad with an Indian theme for the last wagons.A lost art,now digital photography and photoshop is here
Clearly, the Ford ad was before political correctness. Or should we just go with it no longer being acceptable to stereotype and demean minority groups. Except of course the Redskins.
Yes, not a person of color in the whole bunch, except, of course for the lawn jockey in the Kaiser ad.
I was stunned that they included “Dodge breaks down”. Pretty brave. I also enjoyed the boast about the Challenger having leaf springs. Wow, leaf springs!
I’ve seen a lot of 50s BMC and British Ford ads which always seemed to make the car look wider and lower. And generally better.
Well even though it’s marketing fluff there’s some truth to it. Leaf springs are good at axle location, laterally, not so much under acceleration or braking(although Mopars did offset the axle forward to reduce acceleration windup) but that can be accounted for through stiffness and other tricks. If one can put up with the stiffness necessary for a performance setup with them, they do do a decent job, especially in this era where coil setups were often soft and axle location techniques with them were, err not great, not on US cars anyway. GM’s F and 75+ X bodies for example were just about the best handling domestic cars built at the time, despite being the only GM platforms still using parallel leaf springs.
I too have noticed that the paintings make the cars look longer. I have one for a 38 Cadillac and one for a 36 Studebaker and both look longer in the paintings.
These are mostly pretty accurate except the 60’s GM’s which were clearly stretched horizontally. But yes, they often took advantage of painting to stretch the cars. Longer, lower, and wider! Before photoshop it would be tricky to stretch anything without making the wheels oval and the details misshapen.
Sometimes when I look thought oldcarbrochures for a nice vintage picture all I find is longer lower wider depictions.
Always enjoyed the painted ads……Also enjoyed sketched automobile covers and car ads…..Sports Car Graphic[ circa early 60’s] and those 60’s Shelby advertisements….come to mind.
Wonderful collection of ads! Another element of “context of their time” involves the snow scenes. Four of the ads here involve cars driving in snow, yet none of text directly mentions traction or other cold weather ability. Today, meanwhile, there is nothing subtle about winter scenes in car ads. Maybe snow wasn’t as slippery 50 years ago, or maybe people were generally more nonchalant about winter driving.
Both advertisements and people’s attitudes have changed a lot since the age of painted car ads – snow represents yet one more aspect of that.
Big wide cars driven by tiny people. But that ’51 Cadillac ad is superb!
Strangely, I don’t see the ’51 Cadillac ad. I was going to comment that Brendan must’ve forgotten to link it in, but I see others have commented on it so something else is going on….
A long-gone medium, but one that gave you choices that we don’t really see anymore. I especially like that ’64 Chrysler ad – the abstract quality reminds me of some of the great abstract paintings, and how they showed up in some interesting places (like the cover art for Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Time Out”.)
By 1965, Chrysler brochures were still drawn/painted, but most of their magazine ads were photographs unfortunately.
Another aspect of these painted ads is that sometimes they were the only way to give a car decent proportions. Some of Studebaker-Packard’s later ads used artwork to widen and lengthen cars that were not very competitive. In contrast, the Loewy-designed 1953 Starliner featured photographs in many ads, a break from the artwork commonly used then.
The real thing had proportions nothing like those in the ad.
Kinda like an automotive version of an internet dating site…
The ad makes the car look like Sophia Loren… but the actual car looks like Phyllis Diller. lol
Jp, the real car looks more like a Checker Marathon. Eww.
The real car was pretty much a stretched 53 Studebaker with a different roof and fiberglass fins. Pretty terrible in real life.
Nice article Brendan.
Not quite the same thing but along similar lines:
I have been buying and reading the British car magazine CAR for nearly 45 years. In the early 70s when the magazine changed from Mini & Small Car to just CAR, the covers were painted. It would be nearly 1973 or 74 before photographed covers supplanted painted covers.
Photographs that accompanied the car tests were excellent, certainly worth the price of a good frame to hang them on the wall.
As for car companies splitting their advertising among various companies to take advantage of that company’s experience with a particular medium….isn’t it also possible this “split up” is to better target certain groups of buyers?
Ironically, I got to strongly dislike these type of realistic painting ads, especially in the late 1960s when color printing really began to take off and the reproduction was excellent.
Now, for many years I miss it greatly, for it is indeed an almost lost art. True talent is indeed required!
Great article.
Brendan, fine article on a subject dear to my heart. I grew up enjoying those ads in the late ’50’s through the early ’70’s, inspired me to learn how to paint that type of rendering, though long after it was no longer advertising vogue. The painted automotive advertising art conveyed the romance of car ownership in a period when that was still part of the motivation to purchase.
I graduated with a BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Graphic Designin 1985. My class was one of the last ones that didn’t include the personal computer in the curriculum. Previous to that, I had been majoring in Industrial Design and in both of those programs we studied illustration techniques extensively. Who would have known those cute little PCs and Macs would take over and revolutionize our world? Many times when speaking with my younger co-workers, I feel like an old sailor recounting battles that were fought long before these people were born…
As a kid, I remember seeing old magazines with these ads and thinking how old-fashioned they were. Why wouldn’t you use a photograph? It would be much better… Of course after I grew up and started in the world of advertising, I realized the appeal of those illustrations. I gained a greater appreciation of them, especially after having learned the techniques. All that said in my working life, I’ve hardly used those techniques. The advent of the micro computer in our business has been a magnitude not measured in other industries.
When it comes to the Buick ads at the bottom of the post, I have to wonder if those were done on computer. Adobe released Illustrator in the late 1980’s (I still have the install disks and video cassette somewhere in my junk collection) and these could have been done that way. I use the Adobe software as something of a milestone as there were other competing software releases at that time, too.
Many of the modern day “photos” we see these days are renderings. Even 20+ years ago, one could render all kinds of beautiful photo realistic artwork in something like Illustrator and FreeHand. Imagine what you can do with today’s hardware/software and dedicated 3-D render software…
+1 on a lot of modern images being renders. One tell for me – in commercials at least – is when the glass is so dark you can’t see the driver.
I’d say those 80s Buick backgrounds are the real deal, though. I entered the game in the mid nineties and even though computers were in the agencies (mostly for compositing work), stuff as sophisticated as those backgrounds was more likely being commissioned from ‘analogue’ illustrators.
Not just print ads, it’s surprising how much even in TV ads is actually rendered CGI today. If the movie Christine had been made today, they could’ve done it without wrecking any ’58 Plymouths, and almost nobody would be able to tell the difference.
Maybe I`m old fashioned,but these old painted car ads did manage to create a style that is sadly lacking in today`s social media. I`ll take that Cadillac magazine ad over any of today`s Cadillac ads that feature unshaven hipster -yuppie types anyday.Like the man said “its all about image”.
I agree with you on the painted cars ads, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that Cadillac uses “unshaven hipster-yuppie types” in their modern ads. The majority of their ads don’t use people, and those that do tend to use middle-age professional types. Either way, let’s just be thankful Cadillac doesn’t use people in Uggs and yoga pants or in baggy track suits with gold chains – the most common types of Cadillac drivers today.
http://www.ispot.tv/ad/75or/2014-cadillac-srx-mom-song-by-fountains-of-wayne
Worst ad ever. Buy a Cadillac and be like this insufferable ugly douchebag who cares about nothing but making big money and spending it on himself and lives in a faceless super modern house with no meaning.
I don’t mind the house, but that ad is pretty terrible overall. I know it’s supposed to project a kind of upper-class “America f*ck yeah” sentiment but it really does come across as “this is the car for self-important dbags with superiority complexes”.
Yea, pretty LAME commercial… If he really wanted to be “King Shyt”… He would be owning and driving a Tesla… If he wanted a cool electric vehicle.
For one, it would have SEXY styling… Unlike, the fugly Cadillac, that looks like a wedge of cheese on wheels.
Yo, Cadillac… ENOUGH already with the “geometric-shapes” way of designing your cars, it’s getting boring and annoying.
Whose your lead designer, Bizarro Superman?
Nostalgia strikes! I remember many of these very well. The slick way the artists elongated or widened the cars was a real art. Eric 703 is, in my estimation, correct in that drivers in those days just put on some Town & Country tractor-like tires on the rear and headed on out. No big deal.
If you enjoyed this article, as I did, perhaps one of the best sources to view older ads is Alden Jewell’s Flickr account [here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/autohistorian ].
But if you really want to study the art, go back to Lincoln ads throughout the 20s and 30s. Each year featured an art theme: the 1927 ads features had an ornithology theme (see the this and the next post) -another year featured Lincolns and city architecture. They are simply unparalleled.
Another from 1927
Here are the ‘Lincoln & city architecture’ ads
1927 Lincoln
Four passenger, 2-window Berline
Custom bodied by Judkins
Just perfect. Thank you for showing us.
Wonderful write up as others have noted. I can’t say I recall the Buick ’88 retro look at this advertising form.
I don’t know if there is a good CC write up of the whole Kaiser-Frazer thing about building very similar cars with different names, but I look forward to finding it!
I would be responsive to this ad form, and honestly, it makes even the ’88 Buicks that I didn’t find very good looking look better. I detested that LeSabre front end, that body color bar over the grill bothered me to no end. Hard to imagine, but I was tooling around in a 1987 Mercury Grand Marquis, as were so very many others.
I don’t like the ad for the blue LeSabre. The windshield looks too upright and the entire greenhouse looks too tall.
Judging from how you can see all four wheels and the interior of the roof, the viewer’s eyes would be situated at about bumper height, and indeed that may actually be an accurate depiction of the car from down there. In this case they could’ve used a bit of Fitzpatrick-style artistic license to improve it.
The Regal painting is quite flattering, I don’t recall the stance being that low and the track being so (very attractively) wide. 😛
True… maybe if Chip Foose got a hold of one. lol
You probably never looked at one of these while lying on the ground either. 🙂 They’ve also drawn the car as it was about to crest a hill, making it look lower to the ground.
Great article, and yes it is a lost art… always loved seeing the Cadillac ads of the 60’s-80’s, which come to mind, when you speak of auto artwork.
Good news, Brendan, Paul and my fellow enthusiasts… Alfa Romeo also appreciates the lost art, here is a newer one for their new Duetto concept…
Some old school Alfa art for the Alfistis…
Alfa art 80’s style…
Pity the real car looked so ugly.
Wonderful article! I wish car advertising would bring back some true hand-created illustration! Here is another example from 1977: a special version of the Buick Skyhawk called the “Nighthawk”. I am unsure if these were available in Canada as well as the U.S.
Interesting that so many cars are depicted as climbing a hill toward the viewer. Moreover, the hills appear to be about a 50% grade. I guess this is to demonstrate the huge reserves of power.
I was a fan of the early 60s Pontiacs, and these ads really worked for me.
Great write up, Brendan. Advertising is my field, and this is the perfect combination of three things I love – vintage ads, illustration, and cars.
One of the reasons illustration persisted as long as it did was that photographing cars wasn’t as easy as it seemed, especially after they started lathering on chrome, which caused all kinds of unfortunate reflections.
In the 50s, the guys at Boulevard photographic figured out how to use a white seamless stage and light tents to realistically capture chrome. The also developed a curved film back that would stretch the car, but you could only go so far before the wheels started looking like an early 60s Chrysler steering wheel.
Photography was seen as more “honest”, but even in a pre-digital world, images were manipulated. Take a look at many of the DDB VW Beetle ads. Far from straight photography, they usually shot the car from an unusually low angle – for a more heroic image.
Here’s one no-one would have seen before – part of my Uncle’s work when he was an art student in the late 1930s:
Great article. I also love old painted ads. I don’t like most of current ads using photographs with heavily manipulated backgrounds that look unrealistic, and clearly show that the car was just pasted over them.
Some of the painted ads that despict cars realistically, make me wonder if they might have been drawn over photographs. The same feeling comes when I see those old photos that have been retouched by artists, sometimes I’m not sure what am I looking at there
International had beautifully illustrated brochures. Came across one in an antique mall and a year later I bought the truck.
I have lots of illustrated vintage car ads up for sale on eBay. Best offer takes the ad. Just click my name to go to my eBay page.