Virgil Exner

A design puritan at heart, yet no one did excess more excessively

- Richard Heseltine

IT WAS A speech that would come back to haunt him. Virgil Exner enlivened the 1948 American Society of Body Engineers gala by railing against what he saw as ‘Buck Rogers’ automobile design hokum, perpetuated by ‘… the table-cloth artist, the air-brush expert and the plush scale-model stylist’. His concerns centred on how the industry’s integrity would be lost forever if Detroit’s susceptibility to whimsy was allowed to prevail. Today’s designers clearly had talent, he insisted, but what about good taste?

Fast-forward a decade and ‘Exner look’ Chrysler products were synonymous with excess, but then the tail-fin king was nothing if not a contradiction. Seemingly blessed and cursed in equal measure, Exner’s life was rarely dull. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 24 September 1909, he was an unwanted child. His biological parents – a young housemaid and a travelling salesman – abandoned him to state care shortly after his birth. Within 18 months he was adopted by George and Iva Exner of Buchanan, Michigan.

On enrolling at the University of Notre Dame in 1926, car-loving Exner excelled at fine art while terrorising the neighbourhood aboard his hopped-up Ford Model T. He would carve another notch into his steering wheel every time he bested a more powerful machine. But Exner quit higher education half-way into a four-year course: advertising beckoned. He was married in 1930, a father three years later, and a chance commission from a local newspaper changed everything.