HARLEY J. EARL WAS NOT THE FIRST CAR STYLIST; HE WAS JUST THE MOST IMportant. Today, 40 years after his retirement from General Motors and thirty years after his death, he remains the pre-eminent figure in the history of automotive design: a legend, a super ego among towering egos, the man who gave structure and order to an industrial art form that didn’t even have a name before he started.

When GM’s president, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., hired Earl in 1927, he set him up in what Sloan called the Art & Colour Section (that was Colour with a u, to give it a tony British flavour). The fancy title gave Earl’s detractors one more reason to smirk. For several years GM’s engineers referred to Art & Colour as the Powder Room or the Beauty Parlor. But Earl won their grudging respect and eventually established GM as the mother church of auto styling, the university that graduated designers and styling vice presidents for nearly all the other car companies in America. Dick Teague, who became chief stylist for Packard and then design vice president of American Motors, worked at Art & Colour in his younger years. “Mr. Earl had charisma in spades,” Teague recalled. “Everybody called him Misterl, all one word. You never called him Harley to his face.”

Full Story >>