THE DAVINCI OF DETROIT

      Although most people do not recognize his name, millions of Americans look at his lifestyle creations everyday. Now that three  works of art by Harley Earl have sold for a combined total of over $10-million dollars at the January 2005 and January 2006 Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, certainly makes it a good time to start properly locating other various works and increasing awareness on him.

      After initiating the landmark gifts to colleges such as Art Center in California and Pratt Institute in New York prior to 1950, GM Styling supported various educational programs for learning institutions that grew to include more than twenty-five different colleges by 1966. All along the way, HJE's Styling Section reaped the benefits too by having first crack at a fresh supply of graduating auto designers. This long-term vision and planning helped create the original design monopoly General Motors enjoyed for so many years. Plainly, HJE's endlessly mysterious character never allowed him to publicly release all the information on exactly how he invented this new profession that incorporated “…designing style and beauty into the building of modern motor cars”, but he did deliver in his own word the following assertion inside a 1937 publication titled, Modes and Motors:

Out of the merger of art, science and industry have come new techniques that have within themselves the ability to create an entirely new pattern and setting for the life of the world.

Mention the word "art" to a roomful of people and most of them will think of a great painting. Some will think of sculpture or architecture - a few, of music or literature.

But hardly anyone will think of industry.

For art in industry is comparatively new. Only in recent years has the interest of manufacturer and user alike been expanded from the mere question of "Does it work?" to include "How should it look?" and "Why should it look that way?" Appearance and style have assumed equal importance with utility, price and operation. The artist and the engineer have joined hands to the end that articles of every day use may be beautiful as well as useful.

Every civilization has contributed something of importance to man's understanding of the principals of beauty. It remained for our own times, through new forms of skill, to provide the means by which artistic creations are made available to everyone.

Probably in no field have the results of the application of art to the products of industry been more apparent than in that of the automobile.

     Clearly, this aerodynamicist took an unconventional route and channeled all his engineering, marketing, salesmanship and artistic integrity into propelling a whole new career occupation from within Detroit. Even though he publicly wrote about what was coming off GM’s assembly lines as being “The Modern Art of Industry,” he kept the interplay and fundamental ingredients behind his unique auto body development techniques hidden. This element gave him and his Styling Section team members a distinct edge of power inside GM and Detroit, while at the same time enshrouding all this company’s novel new industrial car designs under a veil of secrecy. It was a necessary part to why this pioneer’s flock of hybrid engineering got things done so quickly.

      It did not come easy, and he was constantly developing and perfecting the new profession along the way...

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