Let’s Look At Some Delightfully And Wildly Exaggerated Early Volkswagen Advertising Illustrations

For most of us, the image associated with air-cooled-era Volkswagen advertising is the most famous one, the one still taught to students of advertising, the legendary Doyle Dane Bernbach Think Small campaign, known for its use of witty, urbane copy, extremely straightforward black-and-white photography, and a very grounded sense of honesty and humility. But that’s not how VW advertising started!

Before the DDB campaign, when VW was just barely getting going as a commercial concern, they used much more typical-of-the-era advertising techniques, and that included how their cars were portrayed visually, which is to say, not so accurately.

Those very early Beetles and Buses of the early 1950s may look iconic to us today, but back then they were strange looking beasts, funny little insectile lumps and bigger wheeled loaves, well outside the usual expected window of what people tended to find appealing in cars. So, with that in mind, illustrators like Bernd Reuters took some pretty considerable artistic liberties when portraying these early Volkswagens, and the results are kind of amazing and hilarious, in hindsight.

Just look at that example there, for example. Those are clearly Beetles, but every line has been pushed and massaged and stretched and tweaked, and the result is something so much lower and wider and sensual than the actual car. Also, note the extended semaphore turn signal arm in the lower Beetle there!

Here, let’s do a direct comparison between one of Reuter’s illustrations and a press picture of the actual car:

Those proportions are wildly different! Look how much longer and lower Reuters renders the car, and how the windows have become more rounded, the headlights more prominent, somehow, the fenders fuller and more bulbous, and the pattern of shine and light and dark more dynamic and exciting.

It’s a Beetle still, sure, but not a Beetle that actually exists in normal human reality.

The same approach was taken for the Bus:

Here the passenger version of the bus gets more rounded and flowing, and feels something like a streamliner train; again, clearly a Type 2, but a pretty far cry from reality:

The same ensexification approach was taken for the fully commercial vehicles, too, like Type 2 pickups, because sexy exaggeration knows no working class prejudices:

This one feels something like a Thomas Hart Benton painting to me, with that strangely rubbery quality of the figures and the inherent sense of motion. The truck here is also shiny and gleaming, and yet still shows off the vast carrying capacity of these trucks, both above and below decks.

The feelings these illustrations evoke go far beyond the peoples’ car utilitarian character of the early Volkswagens and inject a good amount of romance and excitement into the cars; and maybe that was something useful for VW’s early introduction to the motoring world, at least until they found their own character and message and identity.

Personally, I love Reuter’s early illustrations, mostly because of the gleeful exaggerations and inaccuracies. I wish I had the time and resources and talent to build a Beetle or Bus based on these illustrations; some skilled metalworker I’m sure could replicate these pneumatic and stretched curves, and seeing a Beetle with these lines and proportions in the metal I think would be sublime.

How has no one tried this yet? Holy crap, would that be cool.