Bringing vintage cars to the parks, estates and golf course fairways where they can flaunt their beauty and compete for honors in the summer’s many concours d’élégance events is a well-rehearsed process.
But as museums have assembled more exhibitions that showcase the artistry and historical significance of automobiles, the task of putting vehicles into public spaces — often in the center of a busy city — has become infinitely more complex. Cars, especially prewar classics, can be huge. And while museums are accustomed to dealing with large artworks, the vehicles present challenges on another scale entirely.
Placing 16 cars inside the Portland Art Museum for the “Allure of the Automobile” exhibition, which opens this weekend, has been the job of Donald Urquhart, director of collections management for the museum.
“These cars present problems, not the least of which is getting into the building,” he said. “Our doors aren’t as big as some of these cars.”
The “Allure of the Automobile” opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2010. With a few changes, the same exhibition has come to Portland.
It was not easy to persuade the owners to lend their cars to a museum at all — let alone twice. When Brian Ferriso, executive director of the Portland Art Museum, approached the High Museum about bringing the show across the country, he was told that getting the cars had been difficult.
Mr. Urquhart said he welcomed the challenge of bringing in the cars.
“In every exhibition, you start with an e-mail picture,” he said. “Then you walk around carrying this 6-inch scale model. When I saw the Sting Ray the first time, I knew it was a 15-foot car, but it looked like it was 30 feet long.”
Mr. Urquhart and his team at the museum created scale models of the three galleries that would house the cars for the summer and a digital fly-through for a sense of the space. Model cars and scale photos pasted to foam backing were placed in the architectural model to visualize the exhibition, arrange it thematically and to make sure the cars would fit in the galleries.
Webb Farrer, who has been ushering rare and priceless cars to exhibitions for 30 years, hopped in, started the engine and drove the car up two plywood ramps, over the sidewalk, past the museum cafe, through the sculpture garden and to the entrance, where the doors and jamb had been removed.
The silver Ferrari was pushed into the building, past the ticket counter and through the interior doors to the first gallery, where it would be positioned just behind the ’61 Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato. Here, the wheels were raised onto special rolling dollies so it could be moved — as if it were on skates — to line up with blue tape on the platform in front of it. The dollies were removed and the car was pushed slowly onto the platform.
Mr. Farrer cited the two biggest, heaviest cars in the show — a 1937 Hispano-Suiza and a 1933 Pierce-Arrow — as the hardest to maneuver into place. The Hispano-Suiza had to be slid onto its platform sideways because there wasn’t room to line it up and roll it on.
What makes “Allure of the Automobile” a treat for those who see it is the opportunity to see such a wide variety of important cars in one place, rather than having to travel all over the world to many museums and collections.
For Mr. Urquhart, that might have been easier.
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