Presenters
Abstract
During the 1930s, as the number of cars—and car crashes—increased dramatically in the United States, artists responded with disturbing views of speeding cars and terrified pedestrians. Americans became aware of this crisis through advertisements for insurance and tire companies, tabloid reports of celebrity crashes, and ominous warnings in the popular press. In 1935, for example, Reader’s Digest published one of the most influential traffic safety articles of the decade, containing gruesome descriptions of “the consequences of fast and irresponsible automobile driving.”
Artists explored this subject through a broad range of paintings and prints. Some relied on traditional visual tropes, as in Albert Abramovitz’s Accident (c. 1937), a contemporary take on the medieval Dance of Death tradition, while others took a modernist approach, including Benton Spruance’s Highway Holiday (1936), a fractured, abstract image of menacing cars and lifeless bodies. Many artists explored the car’s contribution to urban anxiety, but others focused on its role in transforming suburban and rural spaces, as in Grant Wood’s Death on Ridge Road (1935) in which a speeding car veers into the path of truck in an otherwise bucolic landscape.
Such terrifying images of automobiles contrast strongly with those found in advertisements and public venues, particularly at the end of the decade. At the World’s Fair of 1939-40, for example, GM’s popular Futurama exhibit envisioned a world in which cars would glide effortlessly through an elaborate system of highways, while Ford’s Road to Tomorrow exhibit allowed fairgoers to test drive cars on a sleek replica of a clover leaf ramp. Such venues presented driving as modern, efficient, and most importantly safe. This paper examines paintings and prints of traffic jams, speeding cars, and automobile accidents produced during the 1930s. In particular, the paper addresses changing attitudes toward both cars and the act of driving.