by Mark R. DeLong
Writing about American cars stranded in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, John McElroy observed that “there’s something very appealing, almost romantic about these cars. Coated in a patina of history they hearken back to a time when Detroit iron dominated the global auto industry, a time of can-do confidence when buyers were dazzled by toothy chrome grilles, bombsight hood ornaments and sweeping tail fins.” Although it is a bit painful to see the nostalgia about the glory days of the American auto industry in his prose, McElroy uses the word “patina” in exactly the way that car restorers use it. Patina goes beyond what it physically is—which is actually the rot—to include the way the rot got there and something of what the rotted thing represents. There is also something noble in the mix, some good breeding perhaps. Can a 1972 Ford Pinto acquire a patina? I know several classic car owners who would sniff at the thought, and yet, given the right cloud of memory, even a flammable Pinto could wax into someone’s well patina’ed example. Leave one in Cuba for fifty years and it might even cause an old guy’s heart to race. Patina, like love, may be fickle and very much dependent on sentiment and romance.
In the end, recovering the mix of the original and the present in a car under restoration means coming to terms with “patina,” and if you hear someone talk of a car’s patina, you have probably run into someone who is a practicing automotive archeologist, whether or not he or she knows it. To the restorer obsessed with the image of the car the “way it came off the line,” patina is an accumulation of unsavory rot, grease, fingerprints, soot, oxidized whatevers, and molecules of bird droppings. To such a person, a well patina’ed example is a polished turd, in a matter of speaking. But that is only half of the definition. To many restorers (and maybe even a growing number of them), patina truly is storied rot, which makes its grime and molecules something special.
Patina brings the high-falutin’ “automotive archeologist” into the realm of dusty, old-smelling antique shops, with their bespectacled and fusty proprietors. University of Chicago professor and MacArthur Fellow Shannon Lee Dawdy dove into that world in New Orleans—the “antique city” that after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina was marred or ornamented with “Katrina patina.” Dawdy’s careful definition of patina notes that the merits of preserving or removing it have raged for centuries. The first reference to patina comes from Pliny the Elder, who praised Apelles of Kos for inventing a black varnish for softening and preserving colors in painting. “Our earliest known reference to patina was thus to a kind that was artificially applied,” Dawdy writes, gingerly noting that Apelles’ “patina” was faked. Arguments about what to do about patina have especially been waged since the nineteenth century, when art historians furiously argued about conservation. Dawdy sums up the nub of the issue: “Would the paintings still look like authentic old masters if the ‘yellowing of time’ was removed?” And what of the artists’ intentions, since they might have applied paints designed to age into top form or even played tricks with surfaces like old Apelles of Kos did? Dawdy cites John Ruskin who, she says, “valorized patina in his work The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Specifically, patina is a quality of his Lamp of Memory.”
Ruskin would vote against sprucing up deliciously patina’ed Old Masters.
Patina might involve more than wistful memory, lingering sentiment, or disputes among art historians, too. In the 1960s David Pye of the Royal College of Art in London considered how we perceive the surfaces of things, something he had studied over years of tenure as Professor of Furniture Design. In a way, he wedged patina into an epistemology of sorts. Highly polished surfaces, he claimed, “produce an equivocal effect because the surface itself is all but invisible and so becomes most difficult for the eyes to bear on.” The result is “unease” and “uncertainty” because our understanding of a surface—which is, after all, the only thing we can see—is indistinct, ambiguous, “equivocated.” These are, of course, terms of psychological or perhaps even philosophical meaning, dealing as they do with the stirrings within the minds of those who behold a highly polished surface. Pye used silver as an example.1Pye’s choice of silver as an example resonates with the history of the word itself. Patina derives from the medieval word paten, which denoted a dish for the Eucharist. Dawdy points out that this dish was “usually made from a precious metal such as silver” and was carefully polished and cared for. A new and polished silver piece looks “unsatisfactory,” but over time and through use, “the network of minute scratches on its surface, although it does not much blur the reflections, provides a visible boundary for the eyes to bear on at the real surface of the material, in front of the reflections and distinct from them.” Those minute scratches, in effect, make the all but invisible and “equivocal” surface more substantial to the senses. Through these accretions of age and use, we really do see more of the material thing and see it more readily.
Pye noted that “patina and distressed surfaces of one sort and another have been prized from ancient times. So have such accidental or originally accidental modifications as crackle glazes, weathering of stone, fading of wood, Moiré silk, and boarded leather.” There is, in fact, a consensus in other collector communities that unrestored is more valuable than restored, a stance that has begun to take root among car collectors as well. Furniture collectors and restorers (like Pye) are probably the most categorical about the limits of restoration and appear to view restoration as an unfortunate remedy rather than as a means to regain wholeness. “The worst possible option involves removing shellac to replace it with a modern finish,” one flyer entitled “The Philosophy of Restoration” explained, adding: “This is a grave transgression against history and immediately negates all antique value.” The militant attitude emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, art historians tell us, and before that time honor of patina seems to have been absent. Among art collectors, patina had value by lending credence to claims of age, presumably because an old piece looked like an old piece. Determination of age could support claims of provenance and authenticity.
Since 2001, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, arguably the world’s most famous and exclusive car show, has included “Preservation Classes” for unrestored cars. The class celebrates patina of a very special sort, even though there is no definitive rule or consensus for what counts in the show’s Preservation Classes. Peter Hageman, one of the key introducers of the classes to the Pebble Beach show and their current Chief Class Judge, leaned toward the “storied” version of patina—the cars “have become a historical document” and tell a story, he told Autoweek in 2017.
Generally, car collectors have been as confused about what constitutes “patina” as Pebble Beach straw hatters. “Please explain ‘patina’ to me,” a Classic Motorsports online forum participant begged. “To my understanding ‘patina’ is a barn find with a faded but original paint job. For some strange reason this seems to becoming a sort of rage among some people?” A forum participant with the avatar “NoHome” replied with a mixture of erudition and garage and troll talk: “Patina is the history of the car writ in the surfaces that we see and interact with,” NoHome noted, in an almost Pye-sian formulation, and then, turning to garage idiom, continued: “An old car has been around for a while and stuff has happened to it; it has a history. If it, say, belonged to someone famous, it would be their ass that wore out the leather or whose farts seasoned the foam. You paid for that, hence would not want to lose the charm. If you take that car and restore it with new paint, chrome and interior, you effectively zero the history meter and you get to start all over again. Not a bad thing, just not the same car. Walk into any garage containing an old British car and you will SMELL the patina.” That certainly expands the sensory impressions of patina, though a fair question remains whether patina of that sort would fetch much of a price or whether “NoHome” thinks much of patina. And yet even the flip comment points up the interaction of history, memory, and surfaces in the notion of patina.
Passions that patina calls forth point to a difference of views of the automobile as a cultural marker. Reverence for the car “as it came off the line”—that is, absent the grossness of patina—also implies a view of the way a car functions as an object: Apparently untouched by history or, for that matter, practical use, a car hovers above history as an ideal form, an icon referring to (or imagined near) the time it rolled off the assembly line. Honor of patina at least admits that a car may have had practical utility or even could be associated with an event or person, too-much-information about car seats notwithstanding. At the very least, patina shows a car’s longevity and survival. Both pro- and anti-patina stances mark a car as special, either as an idealized cultural signpost or as an artifact gathering value as it moves through history.
Patina can be considered as a feature of a thing, but the collector’s attitude toward patina also indicates the cultural meaning of a thing and, specifically, the function that an object has in eliciting or generating meaning either to an individual or a society. This is a bit more difficult to consider, perhaps; but the arguments among car collectors surrounding the value (or not) of patina can help us understand the greater meaning old cars can take on.
The honor or disdain of patina on a car comes from a larger context in which a valuable car derives its meaning and has a purpose for an individual or for a group. In other words, the cultural meaning of the car determines a tolerance for patina.
Anthropologist Grant McCracken explored “displaced meaning” in order to show how consumer goods and consumerism serve to preserve hopes and ideals, forming a response to “the gap between the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’ in social life [which] is one of the most pressing problems a culture must deal with.” A community’s response to the trouble of unachievable ideals in the present can amount to their “displacement.” The community “will remove them from daily life and transport them to another cultural universe, there to be kept within reach but out of danger. . . . With ideals displaced, the gap between the real and the ideal can be put down to particular, local difficulties.” Where is this magical place where the ideal dwells? McCracken said that displaced meaning can be situated in a fictional world, in the future, or in the past. Ovid’s Metamorphoses provides an example: “Golden was that first age, which, with no one to compel, without a law, of its own will, kept faith and did the right” (I,89-90). Of course, such a distant and unreachable ideal becomes problematic, since it has little relevance for those of us who dwell in the real, even though the golden ideal is no longer buffeted by our brutal present.
And hence, the romance and perhaps the repair of nostalgia. Ruskin invoked the connection of buildings, however patina’ed and worn, with their past glory: “The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age … in lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things.” The building “connects forgotten and following ages with each other,” and its meaning “is in that golden stain of time.”
According to McCracken, re-establishing contact with the ideal—and recovering its displaced meanings—is accomplished through objects. Coveted, just-out-of-reach goods become “bridges.” “The goods enable individuals and groups to recover displaced meaning without bringing it fully into the demanding circumstances of the ‘here and now,’ ” he explained. “Goods serve so well in this capacity because they succeed in making abstract and disembodied meaning extant, plausible, possessable, and, above all, concrete. . . . They represent this meaning by reproducing its value and scarcity through their own.” And modern advertising carefully exploits the notion “that goods are bridges and that their purchase will give the consumer access to displaced ideals.” Consumer society uses “the evocative power of things,” McCracken’s title for the chapter in which his argument appears.
How collecting figures into the drive to recall displaced meaning seems fairly easy to see, since cars are collectible because of their rarity and, for many, because they evoke a connection with a past time and probably a happy one. Collectors often choose cars that were new in their youth. It might be just as apparent why patina—corrosive evidence of the demanding here and how—is so difficult for many car collectors to embrace. Patina conflicts with the ideal that the car represents, and the emblem of an ideal should, after all, concretely reflect its perfection. Ideals glisten. They do not decay. Patina is for things subject to the ravages of history. But, to the contrary, patina can also serve as a marker of authenticity and, important for social hierarchy, the duration of an owner’s claim to the thing itself. Patina, to use Ruskin’s phrase, serves as a valuable “golden stain of time.”
Among car restorers, the boundaries of commerce, value, and culture move and are constantly renegotiated. Like shifting borders in the political world, such boundaries in the restoration world are easily fought over. And the fights in the minds of individual restorers are just as brutally waged, as each piece of a car is removed, evaluated and tossed—into the box of the saved or the bin of the damned. Sometimes patina, rarity, and cultural significance work together to turn a car into an artifact, as is the case with a “historically important” car—say, one of the first fifty or so made of a model, a pre-production prototype, a “one-off” by a renowned designer, or a car owned by a celebrity. When that is the case, professional archeology really means something—since the restoration of the car bears with it the burdens of being a handmaid of history and a conservator of art (as Bulwer-Lytton called archeology). The car becomes, in fact, an artifact. Patina can abound, given happy circumstances and care, because of broadly shared memories.
For the bibliographically curious: Dawdy’s book focuses on New Orleans primarily after the Katrina disaster. A well-written and insightful book: Shannon Lee Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Archeology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). McCracken is a go-to scholar of patina: Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). The problem of definition car shows’ “preservation class”: Norman Mayersohn, “What Does ‘Preservation Class’ Mean When It Comes to Vintage Cars? It’s Complicated.” Autoweek, September 19, 2017. http://autoweek.com/article/classic-cars/what-does-preservation-class-mean-when-it-comes-vintage-cars-its-complicated. A concise manifesto of furniture preservation. Basically, do little or nothing. Eric and Stanley Saperstein. “The Philosophy of Restoration,” December 2002. http://www.artisansofthevalley.com/docs/the_philosophy_of_restoration.pdf. Probably read with McCracken: Muthesius, Stefan. “’Patina’ : Aspects of the History of the Look of Age in the Decorative Arts in Late 19th Century.” Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung 17, no. 1 (2003): 138–42. Perhaps a bit of a by-way, but an interesting perspective of the relationship of craft, materials, and objects (specifically furniture): David W. Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
This article is derived from a book project of mine that examines the car, art, and culture, especially in the United States. The narrative uses a years-long car restoration as a springboard.
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Footnotes
- 1Pye’s choice of silver as an example resonates with the history of the word itself. Patina derives from the medieval word paten, which denoted a dish for the Eucharist. Dawdy points out that this dish was “usually made from a precious metal such as silver” and was carefully polished and cared for.