FUTURE PERFECT: Vintage Futuristic Graphics, ed. Jim Heimann (Taschen, 2002, unpaginated)
DRIVING THROUGH FUTURES PAST: Mid-20th Century Automotive Design, by Hampton C. Wayt (Kythe Publishing, Feb. 206, 59pp)
Here are two more books that I read the same couple days I read the Asimov, posted about earlier.
The first one is a small though heavy-weight trade paperback book from a publisher famous for expensive coffee table books. (This was just $10.) There are more pictures of this book, including some interior pages, at this link. The book has an introduction by illustrator Bruce McCall, who notes that these paintings, from 1930s magazines like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Science and Mechanics, were more fanciful than serious.
And so there are lots of paintings of gigantic flying machines, busy highways full of aerodynamic cars, and mechanized homes. Even some spacecraft at the end. Unfortunately, there are no descriptions or notes of any kind, no table of contents, no index, not even page numbers. Some pages show complete covers of the various magazines, which cost 10 or 15 cents a copy, and some of which brag as having “350 pictures” inside. The book is an amusing glimpse back at a pre-war era of technological optimism. Too bad they couldn’t have gotten someone like Asimov to provide some insightful commentary.
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The second book here is a thin trade paperback that seems to have been produced in conjunction with an exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. (The museum has been there for decades and I’ve never found a chance to visit it.) The exhibit was about auto design trends in the 1940s and 1950s, when aerodynamic themes prevailed, along with tail fins inspired by military jets of the ’50s, and the proverbial flying cars. Each painting is by an actual car designer, or visionary artist (there’s at least one by Syd Mead, who went on to fame in Hollywood, as in Blade Runner), and are speculative, intended to portray concepts, as opposed to being proposals for actual cars. There’s an index listing all 100+ items at the original exhibit, with some 50 of them included in this book. Each image has a title, e.g. “turbine vehicle” or “micro car proposal” or “jet-inspired Cadillac proposal”, along with an artist credit and exhibit item number.
Here’s a photo of one of the Syd Mead items: “For ‘Gyron’ Gyroscopic Concept Vehicle Proposal”, on page 39. Note in this example, and some of the others in the book, the artist does attempt to portray futuristic clothing.
So none of the three futuristic art books covered so far are proper speculations, or even science fiction art. There are lots of example in those two areas as well, and I have a bunch of books on each topic. I’ll be revisiting some of them too.
