When the monumental skyscrapers of Detroit watched over a bustling metropolis, large suites and even entire floors housed art studios and talented artists. Among them were many of the nation’s finest commercial illustrators, drawn to Detroit by lucrative work creating advertising for the automotive industry.

After the lean years of the Great Depression and World War II, the automotive industry enjoyed immense profits and had a staggering advertising budget, numbering in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Many savvy artists became entrepreneurs, and studios like McNamara Associates, Skidmore Sahratian, and Graphic House thrived in close proximity to automotive executives and the advertising agencies that coordinated their publicity campaigns.

New Center Studios, founded by the former artist Art Greenwald, resided in four of Detroit’s most impressive skyscrapers—The New Center, Fisher, Penobscot, and Detroit Bank & Trust Buildings—and could justly claim to be the world’s largest illustration house at its height in the 1960s. In fact, Detroit’s advertising studios rivaled those of Chicago and New York City.

The exhibit DRAWING POWER, at the Detroit Public Library’s National Automotive History Collection, features original works of advertising art created at these studios. Gouache paintings, pen and ink drawings, airbrushes, and even preliminary pencil and marker sketches all reveal the steady and varied output of the illustration studios.

Building an Advertising Campaign
These works of art moved through an elaborate process before being printed in brochures, newspapers or nationally circulating magazines such as Look, Life, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. The concept for an advertisement was usually devised by an advertising agency representing one of the automakers. An illustration studio was chosen to handle the image-making for the ad, and a team of artists, including pencillers, background painters, car illustrators, figure painters, and keyliners, would begin working on a series of illustrations.

At every stage, the illustrations had to be approved by a host of critics, from ad company executives to detail-minded engineers. All of this was accomplished under strict deadlines.

Those illustrators who excelled at their craft, especially the “car men”, were rewarded handsomely for their often round-the-clock efforts.

The vast majority of the work done by these artists has been lost or destroyed. As property of the advertising agencies who commissioned the work, much of the fabulous car art of decades past was simply disposed of when file rooms were cleaned out after an ad campaign’s run, or when agencies moved or went out of business.

DRAWING POWER offers a rare glimpse at the original artwork of some of the finest illustrators in Detroit, and pays tribute to the men and women who worked overnight in a quiet corner of a skyscraper, scrambling to create the images which would be seen by millions of Americans. These artists produced timeless work which we now recognize as perfect representations of not only cars, but an entire era and an idealized way of life.

above left:
C. Hatfield-Bills
1956 Chevy Corvette interior - Brochure
McCallum & Associates
Gouache