If you can get over to Paris by 28 August, the Ralph Lauren collection is well worth seeing.
It's a stunning exhibition, well laid out. The Atlantic takes pride of place at the foot of the stairs. Up on the main floor, the cars with competition history are set out in chronological order, with the Blower and SSK at the front and the 250LM at the back. Away to the right is the F1 McLaren, two mini-theatres showing still photography and a third running marvellous moving footage of each type of car on the race track - Le Mans and the Nurburgring feature heavily. There is a voiceover, and at one point I could make out the dulcet tones of DCN, but the volume was down far too low. On the left are the three remaining exhibits, the XK120, the Gullwing (or Papillon - Butterfly - as its seems to be called in France) and the intriguing XKSS.
OK, so you can't take photographs, but the cars aren't roped off and you can get up really close to them and look at them at length from every angle, and the lighting is very effective.
The exhibition book is only available in French. The text on each car is translated from Beverly Rae Kimes and Winston S Goodfellow's work which first saw the light of day in the Speed, Style and Beauty book which accompanied the Boston exhibition of 2005. The same Michael Furman studio shots can also be found in both books. The French book repeats in English a brief interview with Lauren by Rudolph Rapetti, and a piece on 'Automobile as Art', again by Rapetti.
Apart from the book, you can buy exhibition ties, cuff links, polo shirts (funny, that) and caps, but the museum has missed a trick in not selling postcards of the Furman images or a DVD of the racing footage - copyright issues? The shop does sell one little gem - a pack of playing cards by Piatnik, number 1170, called 'Motor Racing Legends'. The reverse of the cards has that wonderful Monthlery poster of red Alfa, white Auto Union and blue Bugatti coming off the banking. The faces of the cards are a wonderfully eclectic selection - the nine of hearts is the first edition cover of Hawthorn's
Champion Year, and the six of diamonds is Lauren's Blower at Pau in 1930, Birkin chewing on an orange in his vain pursuit of Etancelin's Bugatti.
I can strongly recommend a delightful brasserie called Le Fumoir, opposite the far end of the Louvre from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, and a small wine bar called Juveniles, a few blocks away on Rue de Richelieu, run by an amusing Englishman called Tim Johnstone, who told a great story about him, Jackie Stewart and Frank Sinatra in the gents in Annabel's during Stewart's corduroy cap era.
All in all, a magic day, and Lauren is to be applauded for sending thise georgous cars across the ocean.
Edited by P0wderf1nger, 06 August 2011 - 12:53.
