The Museum Quality Photo Exhibit titled, "Automotive Hollywood: A Tribute to Harley J. Earl"

To see enlarged images and actual photographic measurements of the works art featured in the exhibit, scroll down

The photo exhibit was last featured at the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan next to the Henry Ford Museum.  Before that time, this traveling photo exhibit was displayed at:

Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum

Chrysler's World Headquarters

General Motors Design Center

The Art Center of Kettering University

The Official Website on AMERICA'S AUTOMOTIVE DESIGN LEGACY especially enjoys sharing various scholarly research we've gathered over the years attesting to why this artist's motoramic masterpieces of design are on the rise in the marketplace and often sell for millions of dollars at collectible art auction. To find out more on all the public enthusiasm being generated peruse sidebar links, at left, regarding three works of art by Harley Earl that sold at Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale, Arizona for a combined total of over $10-million dollars during a twelve month period from Jan., 2005 to Jan., 2006. 

ORIGINALLY, this photo exhibit on "how Harley Earl turned his designs into art" debuted at the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI in June 1997. During this time, Harley Earl's supercar --- LeSabre --- was displayed under the beautiful Cranbrook paristyle, shown at right, with a couple of enthusiasts.

FORWARD No. I and FORWARD No. II (above & below) are the same sizes

If you would like to receive text from any of the images, send us a detailed email request

EXHIBIT FORWARD 1 (also readable, in photograph, back up at top):

A big man who packed 235 pounds on his 6-foot 4-inch frame, Harley J. Earl (1893-1969) got his start in styling when he joined his father’s carriage company, Earl Automobile Works. As early as 1916, he began designing custom-built cars for Hollywood stars –  comedian Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle was glad to pay $28,000 for an Earl creation circa 1920.

Harley Earl, his wife Sue and their first-born son Billy moved to Detroit in 1927. The Earls’ life in California had quietly ended and a new phase of history in America’s motor capital was just beginning. The influence of Harley J. Earl would be felt in every part of the mechanized world. The complete methodology used by Earl to integrate the art, science, and showmanship of automobile design would form the foundation of an important emerging facet of the industry. On January 1, 1928 Art & Colour officially became part of General Motors central office.

First inventing the industry or business of designing cars and then going on to create the excitement of "Automotive Hollywood" in Detroit were perhaps his most important automobile triumphs. And yet it is not these milestones that Harley Earl is often remembered. Earl put his stamp on General Motors and his innovations and striking designs helped GM cement its position as the world’s largest auto-maker.

It was Earl who would eliminate running boards and would integrate the headlights, fenders, grill and trunk. He would introduce the pillarless top, hidden spare tire, turn indicators, tinted glass, electric windows, and the power convertible top. He also introduced the two-tone paint job, designed quadruple headlights, and put the first (power) radio antenna on a car. Harley Earl changed the shape and proportions of the car by making it longer, lower and wider. When Earl and his team created the modern car, it came to be with such unerringly simple techniques such as inventing the wraparound "curved glass" windshield, not to mention streamlining the look that was to shape every car for years to come.

EXHIBIT FORWARD 2 (also readable, in photograph, back up at top):

Rugged, dynamic Harley J. Earl (1893-1969) learned the principals of design in a carriage factory owned by his father in Hollywood, California. As a boy, Harley Earl made futuristic models out of clay; models of automobiles, not as they were, but as they might be. Descendant of a family of custom coach builders and body makers, he saw the horse-drawn vehicle give way to the motorcar, and at an early age switched his talents to automobile design.

After taking courses in arts, architecture and engineering at Leland Stanford University Harley Earl returned to Los Angeles to refine his design talents. He was fundamental in the founding of the General Motors Art and Colour Section in 1927. This area later became the Styling Section in 1937. Mr. Earl led the way to industry-wide acceptance of appearance and function being of parallel importance. 

"Styling", as auto body design was known when Harley Earl pioneered it in 1927 was not easily accepted by the stereotype habitants of Detroit's automobile establishment. As David Gartman writes in Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design, "For these men pushing cost-cutting mass production, beauty was a feminine trait that belonged in the parlor, not on machines."

Harley Earl changed all this by driving home his ideas of the "modern." Today’s sleek new-fashioned automobiles are the direct result of Mr. Earl’s early pace setting trend, which was the first touch of class and beauty aimed at appealing to the general public.