Art Forms

Art Fonns

Sir,

I have been reading your articles, comments, and reports since 1947 or thereabouts. During this time I feel I’ve learned much, had much clarified, and have been made to think, all of which cannot be a had thing. I do not remember ever finding you difficult to comprehend, and certainly never a puzzlement — until this month’s issue, page 1326 under VEV sub titled “Mascots” — which I find ven, interesting indeed. Just one sentence leaves me totally bewildered and I wonder if you can help. “These are art-forms, some later degenerating into Art Nouveau.” Whilst you offer your opinion, your time-scale leaves me baffled. I suppose Art Nouveau could be said to have appeared sometime within William Morris’ superb work — I mean the Artist, NOT the Engineer! I would also suppose that Art Nouveau ended in its essence, at the start of World War

One. That leaves a time scale of something like 1875 to 1914. If you agree with the above date(s), it seems to we that it is most likely that all early mascots were designed within an era when Art Nouveau was already well in vogue, and in fact owe their best qualities to that art form. I would cite Sykes’ Spirit of Ecstasy, as being No. Its my reasoning. To that, in the same art (orm, one might liken Pierre Roche’s Loin Fuller as being in the same m6tier, marvellous and breath-taking. I am of course entirely open to your correction, but I suspect you actually meant Art Deco, oe indeed, Are Birmingham. . . .?

Very many thanks for the wonderful covefille you have been giving to motoring sport in the thirties; it has been helping me to fill in many hitherto unknown mysteries and long may you continue your excellent coverage of a period when most of us in our forties were too young to be able to appreciate that basis of what we watched in the early fifties. Swanage JOHN T. DEAN (Words fail me) Incidentally, in the “Mascots’, article I should have said that Freddie Dixon put his plaque in cars his company had worked on, not cars “chosen by him” — Ed.)