Art of the Muscle Car
David Newhardt
Photography by Peter Harholdt
MotorBooks (2009)
Capricorn Link (Australia)
Reviewer:
Bob Estreich
This
beautiful book is an unashamed tribute to the American muscle car of the 1960s
and early seventies. It must be admitted that they were fuel guzzlers with
dreadful handling and often quite ugly looks, but many people lusted after them
and bought them in huge numbers. They finally went the way of all dinosaurs,
not killed off by a comet but gradually made extinct by rising fuel prices,
ridiculous insurance premiums and cries that they were dangerous.
Now
we can only look back at them with nostalgia and forgive them their faults. In
the great grey blandness that is our current auto industry these cars stand out
as individuals, a sign of what there was before conformity was forced on us.
Peter Harholdt’s beautiful photography highlights the surviving preserved cars
and gives us some idea of what we have lost.
Beauty
is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but even the most biased observer
would have to admit that some of these cars were almost indescribably ugly.
Rear boot lids the size of a small airport featured for many years. The front
grille treatment varied from the breadslicer look of the 1971 Dodge Charger
Super Bee to the unbelievable rocket-shaped profile of the nose of the 1970
Plymouth Road Runner Super Bird. From the front the whole bonnet had the flat
sloping look of later Italian models, but there was just so much of it! The
huge nose was offset by a monumental and impractical rear spoiler that rose so
high it would be a danger to low flying aircraft. The whole car was longer than
a politician’s campaign speech, and it only had two doors in all that sheet
metal. But practicality wasn’t what these cars were about. It was purely about
street pose value and these cars had it by the bagful. Harholdt’s photo of the
Plymouth captures this and he even manages to make the Plymouth look quite
sexy.
Those days are gone now. A two door car
is a rarity, as is a V8 of 400+ cubic inches. I wouldn’t say that car styling
has improved but it now has none of the individuality of these muscle cars.
Still, at least we have this book to remind us of what was.
As befits such a labour of love by the
author and photographer, the book is hard bound and beautifully presented on
quality gloss paper that makes the most of the photos.
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This review will appear in Volume No. 2 No 6 (2009) of the digital
and print edition of Synergy Magazine.
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