Gabriel Voisin always did exactly
what he wanted. With the C20 Mylord, what he wanted was to make a car like no
other
Let’s not say ‘giddy’ shall we? It might be
spot-on, but for a very middle-aged man with pretenses of professional dignity,
somehow “thrilled” seems a touch less unbecoming. And I’m so tremendously
thrilled by this low, lean, rakish Voisin that I think as we glide majestically
through the startled American suburbs I’m actually giggling behind a school
girlish hand. It is, after all, perhaps the best example ever of true
automotive Art Deco elegance, in the original, unadulterated ’20s idiom, a
daring masterpiece from something of a personal hero, and rarely even
photographed away from a grassy Concours lawn, let alone driven on a real road.
Voisin
C20 Mylord
I am, if anything, more thrilled still when
Mark Lizewskie of the John W Rich Museum pulls over to give me the wheel and I
notice what those grassy lawn shots never show: a dense, distinctly inelegant
mass of roiling oil fog trailing out behind the sleeve-valve V12 exhaust,
eminently worthy of a tired two-stroke chainsaw with flaccid piston rings.
Because that fog would have concerned
Gabriel Voisin not in the slightest. He could very well have reveled in it;
more than anyone else, he built cars to please himself, without regard for the
customary or expected, and his devotion to infamously smoky sleeve-valve
technology illustrates that admirably. Voisin, you see, had a hang-up about
engine noise. Actually, he wasn’t fond of noise in general, and once at a
family gathering when a favorite nephew was put to bed with a toothache, he
interrupted the child’s pain-wracked wailing to tell him ‘Shut up or I’ll kill
you’.
Let’s
not say ‘giddy’ shall we? It might be spot-on, but for a very middle-aged man
with pretenses of professional dignity, somehow ‘thrilled’ seems a touch less
unbecoming.
So the sleeve-valve’s smooth, quiet,
virtually funereal power appealed to Voisin immensely and, as for its oil
thirst and reeking cloud, even by the relaxed standards of the period, well,
what of it? As long as his car company was his, he stuck with the design, more
commonly associated with stodgy limousines and snubbed by his fellow
fashion-forward, hyper-luxury-sports manufacturers Hispano-Suiza or Bugatti
(and Voisins were seriously dearer than Bugattis). If a customer complained
about basically anything at all, Gabriel was quite likely to suggest they’d be
happier owning something built by a different marque.
He was serious, too. Voisin appreciated
automobiles, but had no inherent yearning to sell them and came into the
business almost by default. He was by nature a philosopher and artist, a gifted
mechanic and a prolific lover. By training he was an architect who, like many
intellectually curious Frenchmen as the 20th century dawned, caught the
aviation bug early and followed their passion.
Voisin
appreciated automobiles, but had no inherent yearning to sell them and came
into the business almost by default.
Along with his younger brother Charles,
Gabriel became one of the great pioneers of Manned flight, and would insist
until his dying day that the frères Voisin – not the frères Wright – had built
the first proper aero plane and, depending on your definition of proper aero
plane, he had a point.
They undeniably did build the first aero
plane factory, in 1906, and Avions Voisin made a packet supplying the French
air force during the Kaiser War. The accompanying bloodshed, however, ruined
aviation forever for Gabriel, and with the post-war aircraft market
understandably flat, he turned in 1919, seemingly again motivated chiefly by
intellectual curiosity, to high-end motor cars.
The first car to wear the Avions Voisin
badge - badging them as Automobiles Voisin would have been far, far too
conventional, of course – was uncharacteristically a third-party platform of
expedience. It was called simply the C1, after the Voisin practice of giving
each chassis a ‘C’ number. Some say this honored Charles, who died in 1912
(eerily, as did Wright brother Wilber) in a road crash; others say it stood for
nothing more than ‘chassis’. Regardless, Gabriel Voisin soon added a puzzlement
of component code names anyway, as in chassis Simoun and body Mylord. A foolish
consistency, Quoth Emerson, is the hobgoblin of little minds.
They
undeniably did build the first aero plane factory, in 1906, and Avions Voisin
made a packet supplying the French air force during the Kaiser War.
But from there onward, Voisin’s imagination
was prodigious. He experimented with everything from automatic transmissions to
magnesium pistons; he had a version of anti-lock brakes in 1921, and his 1923
Laboratoire race car was an airfoil-shaped monocoque. Such engineering
adventurism didn’t necessarily appeal to the average hyper-luxury buyer,
though; realistic sales estimates during the company’s 19 years of production,
the last six of which were only marginally under Voisin’s control, range from
8000 to maybe 15,000 units.
That’s not to imply Voisin didn’t attract a
devoted following, and of a markedly high-profile demographic. Some 86 crowned
heads were customers, as were Josephine Baker, Moulin Rouge superstar
Mistinguett, HG Wells, and avant-garde filmmaker Man Ray . Rudolph Valentino,
the world’s biggest celebrity, had at least three or four, as did French
President Alexandre Millerand (but probably not, as is frequently miswritten,
French President François Mitterrand).
That’s
not to imply Voisin didn’t attract a devoted following, and of a markedly
high-profile demographic.
Still, Gabriel’s clientele disappointed
him. In line with the era, many Voisins were sold as rolling chassis to be
bodied by outside concerns and, despite promises to void the warranties of
gross offenders, some buyers insisted on choosing disgustingly heavy and très
ordinaire superstructures.
From 1925, Voisin’s imagination therefore
expanded toward haute couture bodywork. The date is significant: it coincided
with the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels
Modernes, from which the phenomenon now known as Art Deco exploded. The
distinctively geometric approach, reflecting the precision and excitement of
science and technology and the bold color contrasts and sharp angularity of
newly discovered Egyptian graphics, had an immediate effect on art,
architecture and industrial design worldwide, including the work of impeccably
plugged-in Gabriel Voisin and his sometime styling colleague, architect André
‘Noël-Noël’ Telmont.
