Glorious concept cars inspire and delight

Bottom line: This exhibit of 17 high-concept, often jaw-dropping couture cars is fun on wheels.

Filled with exquisite specimens of imagination distilled into physical form, “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas” at the High Museum imagines automobiles as priceless gems, tantalizing, unattainable and shimmering in a shop window.

“Dream Cars” features 17 American and European concept cars from 1933 to today from an international cadre of designers working for Bugatti, Ferrari, Ford and others. Sometimes the cars made it to the road — Henry Ford’s son Edsel made the forest green 1934 Model 40 Special Speedster his personal chariot — and some lived forever on paper and in a designer’s wildest imagination as with drawings of fantasy cars from iconoclastic designers such as Buckminster Fuller and Norman Bel Geddes.

Concept cars allowed designers to push the design envelope and in many cases indulge their own predilections. These “cars of the future” brim over with another era’s idea of innovation, whether in a cherry red paint job or a chassis so low, drivers would have to bend themselves into origami in order to fit behind the wheel.

The assembled cars range from the jaw-droppingly gorgeous to the laugh-out-loud, deliciously absurd like Paul Arzens’ fanciful three-wheeled 1942 L’Oeuf Electrique, or electric egg, a car that could have starred in Terry Gilliam’s futuristic “Brazil.” With its enormous, bubble head cab, brushed aluminum body and plexiglass doors held on with Band-Aid-like rivets, design is only the second most interesting feature of the electric egg, whose look melds golf cart and child’s toy.

The real shock is under the hood, so to speak, in the electric power source, created as a way to get around World War II rationing. The look of the car is cartoonish and out of proportion — in the most delightful way imaginable, mind you. Comparably, gleefully animated is a 1936 Stout Scarab with the huggable cuteness and sunny disposition that suggest a precursor to the Volkswagen Beetle.

But cuteness is, in most cases, edged out by lip-licking sex appeal in “Dream Cars.” Is it any wonder so many were designed to seat only two? Or that the arrowlike 1955 Chrysler “Gilda” was named by its Italian designer after the 1946 Rita Hayworth film of the same name famous for the starlet’s sexy striptease? The majority of cars are dream machines for lovers, a nirvana of unfettered, child-free sexiness with room for an overnight bag at the most.

The allure of aviation looms large over the show: A great number of the cars were designed factoring in innovations in air travel and a desire for greater speed, lightness and aerodynamics. The only thing missing from the exhibition is film of some of these cars in motion. It’s maybe for the best, since their actual progress was surely not as exquisitely fast as these sleek, bulletlike chassis often suggest.

The exhibition is a time-shifting expression of what defined luxury in various eras, from the vast, boatlike shape of the glorious maroon 1947 Norman Timbs Special to the sexy, projectile tail lights and windshield tinted like a starlet’s sunglasses of the 1951 General Motors Le Sabre. Seventies-era custom cars have the look of fantasy objects conjured up in a 14-year-old’s Trapper Keeper sketches. At just 37 inches high, the precariously low-slung 1970 Ferrari 512 S Modulo looks like something built to navigate the surface of Mars.

There are surprising innovations, too, that we may now think of as modern inventions, like heated seats in the Le Sabre, rear-mounted cameras in the 1956 Centurion and the hidden headlights in the gloriously sleek 1941 Chrysler Thunderbolt whose minimal ornamentation included two lightning bolts on the car doors, like a woman’s enunciative beauty mark.

Traversing this exhibition means succumbing to a beguiling buildup of visual one-upmanship: Each of the 17 cars included in this exhibition is more outlandish or beautiful than the last. Though the exhibit seems shrewdly timed to correspond with Father’s Day, there is universal appeal to this show, for the auto-fetishist and dabbler alike. Even people who can’t get remotely excited by the notion of a car show may be surprised by “Dream Cars” and find themselves intoxicated by the perfume of innovation and gasoline. These are sublime objects with aesthetic appeal — pieces of sculpture that just happen to also move. They are sure to appeal to fans of design, but also to fans of pure form.

Newer concept cars like a BMW with a spandex shell — Spanx on wheels — and a Porsche fit for a Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller suggest objects designed by a movie special effects team and feel less like the anything-goes, even loopy vision of some of the historic cars on display.

“Dream Cars” may leave visitors slightly wistful for the days when this level of dreaminess resulted in objects this spectacular and inspired.