Petrol & Ink

Art deco car art

Art deco car art in three original prints: a streamlined record car under a sunburst, a coupe in a night-time city of skyscrapers, and a roadster on a sunlit riviera road. All three use the shapes of the late 1920s and 1930s, when cars and buildings were both being designed to look fast.

Explore Speed Record: formats and prices →

From £15.99 · Poster

Speed Record
From this collectionSpeed Record

Artworks and prices

Open one for its formats and sizes. Free UK delivery is in every price.

The short version. Deco is the most decorative this collection gets, and it stays the right side of kitsch because the decoration was structural: the fins, the teardrops and the speed lines were what designers believed fast should look like. These three are car artwork in that idiom, printed to order, and they are the ones that make a room look considered, not enthusiastic.

The three

Speed Record is a land-speed racer arrowing across the salt flats under radiating geometric sun rays. Record attempts were the decade's obsession and they produced the strangest-looking cars anybody has built, because nothing about them had to be practical. Machine-age glamour, held still.

Deco Metropolis takes the car into the architecture: an elegant coupe in front of stepped skyscrapers and a stylised moon, in midnight blue, gold and cream. This is the one that proves the point about cars and buildings, because you can't easily say which half of the picture is doing the work.

Deco Riviera is the holiday. An open roadster on the corniche above a geometric sea with a liner on the horizon, in the travel-poster idiom the decade invented. It's the easiest of the three to live with in a room people sit in.

Hanging deco

Deco is a strong decision, so these want space, not company. One of them centred on a wall does more than two of them side by side. Deco Metropolis takes a natural wood frame well, because the gold in its palette picks the wood up.

If the geometry appeals more than the glamour, 1930: The Roadster, one continuous line on cream, is the austere version of the same instinct. If the period is what you're after, not the styling movement, the vintage posters cover the same years in a different register. The wall handles size and framing.

Questions, answered

Are these real 1930s cars?
They are car artwork in the art deco idiom, printed to order, not photographs or reproductions of period cars.
Which is the best one to start with?
Deco Metropolis if you want the cars-and-buildings idea in one picture, Deco Riviera if the room is somewhere relaxed.
Do they work as a set?
Two of them do. Each one is composed to hold a wall on its own, and all three together is a lot of deco in one place.
What frame suits art deco prints?
Natural wood, more often than black. Warm metallics such as the gold in Deco Metropolis are picked up by wood, where black tends to close the picture down.

Next in the art

Vintage car posters →

Vintage car posters, newly made: five original artworks drawn the way motoring posters were drawn between the 1930s and the 1950s, with flat colour, strong diagonals and print grain. They are not reproductions of archive posters, and there is no licence fee inside the price.

Try it

Upload a photograph of your car, pick one of nine styles, and review the result before ordering. Three free previews a day, verified email and no card.

Try it on your own car →

Or the photograph itself, printed as it is