Perspectives
Retired photographer Jim Secreto’s trove of automotive advertising art may be second to none. Now the question arises: What will become of it? BY RONALD AHRENS |
W
BECKY SIMONOV
hile working on a book three years ago, Rob Keil came from California to pay a call on Jim Secreto, the collector who, as Keil puts it, keeps “the story of car advertising all in one big room.” Secreto stores this trove at a secret Oakland County location — 1,400 square feet filled floor-toceiling with rare illustrations, dye-transfer photographic prints, 8 x 10-inch color transparencies, car catalogs, and ad proofs. It’s the accumulation of more than three decades of collecting. Keil was keen to see and photograph several works by the Mid-century illustration team
known as Fitz & Van, who labored together for 24 years and refined their art to an exceptional degree. Going behind the curtain, so to speak, Keil found the mass of material to be “fairly well organized” and Secreto’s passion to be palpable. “He’s just got an incredible library of stuff that he’s collected over many years,” Keil says by phone from San Francisco, where he’s an art director at Gauger and Associates, a marketing communications agency with offices near the Embarcadero district. “He can trace the evolution of Detroit advertising — car advertising, specifically — for about the last 100 years. He knows more about it than anyone else I know.”
FRAMED HISTORY Jim Secreto’s collection of automotive advertising art includes original artwork for Plymouth by Fitz & Van; it was the inspiration for the book “Art Fitzpatrick & Van Kaufman: Masters of the Art of Automobile Advertising.”
As a 10-year-old looking at ads for General Motors’ Pontiac Division in his father’s old National Geographic magazines, Keil was mesmerized by the work of Fitz & Van. He saw their AF/VK signature, but it took him years to figure out the letters stood for Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman. Working in gouache, the opaque form of watercolors, Fitz gave the cars mirror-like surfaces and dimensional distortions to emphasize length, or — in the WideTrack Pontiac campaign — width. In gouache or colored pencil, Van supplied the detailed backgrounds, depicting aspirational locations and catching people in exuberant moments.
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