Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939

April 12–July 27, 2025

“Roaring” is divided into six sections that make a powerful point: When the Great War ended, all roads led to the car. Laura Jacobs, The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2025
Roaring explores the transformative role of the automobile in pre–World War II France and highlights innovations across art and industry by those who embraced it as a provocative expression of the modern age. This expansive exhibition features paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture, films, fashion, textiles, and 12 historic automobiles.

Early 20th-century France attracted visionaries from across the globe with creative and economic opportunities. Fusing craft and technology, automobiles absorbed and influenced facets of modern art, design, fashion, and architecture. After World War I, cars—long the domain of engineers—met the minds and hands of French designers, artists, and craftspeople. Materials and techniques moved fluidly between sumptuous Art Deco interiors and luxury automobiles. Avant-garde showrooms, glittering displays, and thrilling races helped market the thousands of cars driving off assembly lines. Those same factories became centers of a labor movement that brought paid vacations and efficient automobiles to French workers.

In cars, artists discovered novel perspectives, subject matter, and even canvases. As driving became more comfortable, motoring fashions evolved into stylish wardrobe staples. Magazines portrayed liberated women dressed in knit sportswear driving convertibles. When fashions streamlined, so did cars. Embodying aerodynamics and natural forms, the sculptural curves of 1930s French custom, coachbuilt automobiles are unrivaled today. With an open, interdisciplinary approach, Roaring illuminates the rich ecosystems that nourished this golden age of French automotive design.

With its eclectic array of objects and triumphant joie de vivre, this is a show in which the art of curation impresses as much as any individual artwork — but never such that the conceit overshadows the beauty of what is on display.
Eileen G’Sell, Hyperallergic, May 26, 2025
Divided into six sections, the exhibition assembles more than 160 works, comprising major loans from prominent institutions and private collections around Europe and North America. Roaring is accompanied by a 210-page exhibition catalogue with contributions from seven authors.

Roaring is curated by Genevieve Cortinovis, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, with research assistant Sarah Berg and automobile curation by Ken Gross.

The exhibition is presented with generous support from the Enterprise Mobility Foundation™ and Barbara and Andy Taylor. Additional support provided by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation, the E. Desmond Lee Family Endowment for Exhibitions, the Edward L. Bakewell Jr. Endowment for Special Exhibitions, and donors to the Roaring Society.

The Saint Louis Art Museum is generously funded in part by SLAM Members and donors, and the citizens of the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County.