The language of loveliness

Whether described in English, French or Italian, the Talbot-Lago Teardrop is the most remarkable expression of Style Moderne, as Stephen Bayley explains

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They said Antonio – later ‘Tony’ – Lago was ‘spietato ma con grande fascino’ (which is to say ‘ruthless, but charming’).

And they said of his most famous car that it was ‘une veritable oeuvre d’art’. They also said it was ‘una vera opera d’arte’. It’s a real work of art! And all of these are doubtless true. Thing is, you need three languages to understand the complicated story of the ‘Teardrop’ Talbot.

You can read anything that is made like a book, Henry Ford once said, provided you know how. And what is formally known as the Talbot-Lago 150-C-S proves this. It might better be compared to a library than a single volume, so many references does it contain. The threads and filaments of European motor car culture – technical, commercial, artistic, romantic, erotic – are woven into its story, its back story and its future.

They weren’t wrong. Of course, you can look at any car as if it were a work of art, provided you know how. This doesn’t work so well with a Hillman Minx (an incongruous bit-part player in this story, as I will explain). In every sense, the astonishing creation that is the Teardrop beggars definitions of where machines end and art begins – a preoccupation of the culturati in the decade when it was built.

When the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi attempted to bring one of his gleaming metal abstract sculptures into America, US Customs insisted it was a machine component, not a work of art, thus attracting a higher level of duty. Besides Brancusi, other artists were exploring the evocative possibilities of abstract sculpture that fluttered on the edge of being representational. Man Ray made a paperweight as an hommage to Priapus. Only a very dull person would not get the phallic visual reference.