I’ll be completely honest with you: I’m so very very tired. I flew out to Los Angeles, then drove to Buttonwillow, California, where I’ll be doing some Lemons race judging tomorrow. Or, I guess, today, when you’re reading this. I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep and I want nothing more than to pass out into the warm, welcoming void of slumber, but I mustn’t, which is a contraction of “mustard nut,” referring to the old belief that every pot of mustard contained a magic nut that, when eaten, compelled a person to fulfill their basic responsibilities.
My mustard nut is Cold Start, so I’m doing one now, dammit.
Because I’m on the West Coast, I can’t wait until morning to do it, since then it would be too late, and our managing editor Peter would have soaked his work-trousers in rage-urine, and, frankly, we can’t afford the dry-cleaning bills. Who the hell wears pure otter silk work-trousers? Sensitive skin my ass, he just likes them.
Anyway, the good news is I happened to encounter yet another weird-ass Mercury brochure, this one being weird because of the main artistic stylistic method used for it: sculpted reliefs. Look, here’s a sample page:
Okay, nice Marauder X-100, looks fetching in that red-and-black two-tone, the inside is pleasingly bordello-like, but what’s up with that, um, illustration? It’s partially illustrated, isn’t it? Let’s zoom and enhance. COMPUTER! Zoom, and enhance!
Well, I’ll be nut mustarded! That open-wheel race car looks like it was sculpted out of some slab of clay! As in a relief sculpture, less shallow than you’d guess. This is a deeply, powerfully weird choice for a printed, two-dimensional brochure! Let’s look at another one:
Guy playing tennis relief, over some more straightforward illustrations. The quality of the reliefs are rough and expressive; really quite beautiful, almost gestural. I’ve never really seen anything like it in a car brochure.
Look at this! there’s a ships wheel and a salty captain and even some receding objects in the background! Again, beautiful, impressionistic sculpting, but still, so strange! I was baffled why these would exist, but then I realized something: I wonder if this is the work – and material – of one of the clay modelers in Mercury’s styling studios.
Hear me out: what if the reason this brochure exists like it does is because one of the clay modelers also happens to be an excellent sculptor of human figures and other things in general; what if this sculptor would sometimes take leftover clay from a car styling model and “sketch” other things in it, and someone in marketing noticed it, and thought hey, what a novel way to illustrate a brochure?
So then they gave the modeler a bunch of clay and some vague instructions to sculpt quick reliefs of people doing sports-things, a racing car, a ship captain, and, why the hell not, a dog:
This seems like a plausible explanation to me. That looks like modeler’s clay, and a carmaker would have skilled clay scluptor/modelers on staff. Maybe I can email Ford’s archive folks and find out.
I do love the swimming pool blue of this Marquis, too, by the way.
And the massive pillarlessness of this two-door coupé.
A brochure illustrated with sculpture! What a world.
Makes perfect sense. And funny too! 😀
Wow, Bill Belichick!
Oh, 1969 is the model year, not the age difference between Belichick and his model girlfriend.
On a nice crisp Autum morning…
There is nothing finer than wearing Chinchilla under garments, a light Cashmere polo and of course otter silk work-trousers and custom made Russell Moccasins
That art (reliefs and illustrations) has huge “Atari 2600 game box art” energy.
So that’s where Star Wars got the Han Solo Frozen In Carbonite idea from!
(haven’t read the 35 other comments to see if anybody else saw that, yet)
I thought that as well, but also got a bit of a Pompei vibe out of it.
Design studio clay sculptors had very little “free time” on their hands to do works like these. They certainly might have had the talent or skills, but not the time. However, I did once know a talented but chronically unemployed artist in Detroit who went to the same design school most auto designers did, and he would/could have quite easily done this kind of thing. And been pretty cheap, compared to someone an advertising agency might otherwise have had to pay for that kind of quality work. I’d bet money it was him, and that he’d have been suggested by one of his former classmates who felt kinda sorry for him. I felt kinda sorry for him too, after I’d slept with his girlfriend. Oh my god, she was hot!
Jesus that escalated quickly :))
Mercury Marketing Guy had just returned from a family trip to Mount Rushmore that Summer of 1968.
“Did you know there isn’t a house on top like in “North by Northwest”? Totally fake!”
“Because I was thinking – wouldn’t it be groovy if we got a Mercury up there?” he wondered aloud as he was telling his vacation stories to the guys in the office…
“Hey!” Mercury Clay Model Guy said from behind the box of crullers – “That gives me an idea…”
The rest is history.
Bas! I say!
(Yet another blague père.)
Old car brochures are an artform like no other.
Is that first picture John F. Kennedy? He did jump start the Mercury program.
Well this WAS 1969 so it’s a safe assumption everybody in the design studio was drunk and or high from all the solvents and marker fumes.
Or acid or hash or weed or mescaline
Oh fuck I’ve just realized what flower power actually means. Holly shit.
Maybe it’s just my old phone but the black used in some of the brochure pictures seems *especially* black, like on the trunk lid and buttresses of that Marauder X-100, almost like they used Vantablack (boo, Anish Kapoor!!) or Black 4.0 (yay, Stuart Semple!!)
Wonder if it was the same artist that did similar clay bas-relief illustrations that occasionally showed up among other illustrations by various artists in some of the literature anthologies that were commonly read in middle school/junior high school/high school English classes (I still have one from that era, circa 1970-’71, somewhere that has a story illustrated with photos of amazingly detailed bas-reliefs, so to speak, made out of folded and crumpled colored paper and a story that has lovely illustrations made using batik. Seriously cool!)
I’d love to get a copy of that brochure – partly for its artistic merit, but also for personal connection. I grew up occasionally riding and driving in the 1969 X-100 Marauder that my grandfather bought new in ’69. He didn’t like the two-tone paint, so it was a customer order in solid blue. 57 years later, it’s still in the family.
There’s an artist’s signature under the hunter that I can’t quite make out.
“Rogers”, if that helps.
Possibly H. Rogers from a couple of the other images, though that name doesn’t pull up much on google.
This one is for the record books in so many awesome ways.
Well done, very well done.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I feel bas-relieved.
Now I want biscuits
“Nut Mustarded” that better damn well be in the Oxford English Dictionary within the next couple of years.
I suggest we all start using that term all over the net so that it goes completely viral.
I can’t wait to be sent a t-shirt that says
I Went to Jasonia and got Nut Mustarded
Leave a big tip.
I reclined my seat and the got nut mustarded by the guy behind me.
Suggest you avoid google images of it..
Carving aristocrats out of clay for a Mercury brochure would seem to be the premier activity for white collar folks in the late 60’s.
I took some classes from old-school illustrators back in the mid eighties and they were always on the lookout for things that were fast and different (art directors had seen a million ordinary cuts and doing something different and/or fast would get you work).
One I really remember is the guy who did a big-deal logo by building a weird plywood jig then stretching canvas over it, then using lighting to get the exact shadows he wanted. All us students were like “whoa!”
I also met Matt Mahurin; his whole career got off the ground because he was the guy who could get the finished art to you that afternoon.
So many questions. Are these photos of real reliefs? (relieves?) Or illustrations of them? If they’re real, how much did they cost?
Also, let’s look at the upper right of the sea captain page. Oh, the casual sexism of the dude showing the little lady how to look through whatever that is, not even letting her hold it.
You see the skill and artisanship of a talented person, my first thought was “AI slop back in the day”.
Thank you for having a more positive outlook on things; I can use it.
Carbon-freezing. The Empire got them!
“I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold.”
“I love you!”
“I know”
“I hate sand.”
The front end treatment on these Mercs was always very attractive. We need to bring broughamy-headlight covers back. With Fleur-di-Lis and shit like that.
The Bishop needs to get on this STAT!!!
I wanna see fancy BMWs, Mercs, and Caddys with hideaway headlights!
I wonder how they’d look on a CUV, too! Let’s see an Equinox it flip open headlight doors!
After seeing BMW’s styling the last few years, Broughamization can’t make it any worse.
When it comes to modern BMWs, I’d rather see hideaway grilles.
Yeah, Lexus too.
I must say I like the front ends on the current Cadillac EVs like the Lyriq and Celestiq. They have that presence that Cadillacs are supposed to have.
Must take serious precision to get that ballcap brim right.