Virgil
M. Exner:
Design Visionary
Virgil Exner, Chrysler Corporation's first vice-president of styling, once characterized automobile design as "art made practical." Automobile enthusiast and consummate artist, "Exner," recalls a former associate, "had an intuitive sense of body form. He was truly the father of reproportioning the car and the shape of the automobile. He was a visionary."
Born in 1909 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mr. Exner received his art training at Indiana's Notre Dame University. After an impressive beginning in the Pontiac studio at General Motors, Exner joined the Raymond Loewy industrial design firm in 1938. There, for over a decade, he shaped the design of Studebakers, especially the electrifying 1947 Starlight coupe.
In 1949, Exner joined Chrysler as head of advanced styling, where he was soon responsible for a spate of creative "idea cars"--the K-310, the Chrysler d'Elegance, De Soto Adventurer, Dodge Firearrow, and many others, all handcrafted by Ghia coachbuilders in Italy.
Exner was destined to have a major impact on the engineering dominated company. When he arrived at Chrysler the development of new models was supervised by body engineers, not designers. Exner fought for and won control of the clay models by designers, as well as design approval of the die models used to create production tooling.
His first production cars for Chrysler--the 1955 "Forward Look" line--boasted the elegant "microphone taillight" Imperial and the first of the gutsy Chrysler 300s. Two years later, in 1957, Exner shocked the entire industry with a line of low, innovative, wedge-shaped automobiles, dramatized by soaring tailfins designed in part for improved aerodynamics.
"We wanted," he said, "to give our cars an eager, poised-for-action look which we feel is the natural and functional shape of automobiles." Among their many innovations was the first use (on the '57 Imperial) of curved side glass in a production automobile. For his efforts Exner and his staff were awarded the Gold Medal of the Industrial Designers' Institute, one of his six national design awards.
In 1960, Exner again altered the proportions of the car with the Valiant, whose sculptured lines revived the long hood-short-deck apparance of European and classic era automobiles.
After leaving Chrysler in the early 1960s, Mr. Exner headed his own industrial design firm in Birmingham, Michigan, where he worked on a variety of automotive and nonautomotive projects until his death in 1973. Among these was the design for a proposed revival of the classic Duesenberg motorcar in 1966, as well as designs for pleasure boats, another of his loves.
In addition to some of the cars you see here today, Virgil Exner's design legacy can be further appreciated through an impressive portfolio of his drawings and paintings, recently donated by his son Virgil Exner, Jr. to the Edsel Ford Design History Center at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.
