This Flamboyant French-Bodied Series 62 Is The Most Outrageous Of Coachbuilt Cadillacs

Take a good, long look at the 1948 Series 62 Cabriolet by Saoutchik as it heads to the auction block.

If any cars merit that old, cliched “rolling sculpture” sobriquet, it’s the art deco works of the French carrosseries, or coachbuilders. As with any shop building custom bodies for wealthy clients, their focus was on style. Predictably enough, though, the French pushed the design envelope way, way further than the Americans, Germans or Brits dared in the decades before WWII (and a few brief years following it).

Their dramatic lines remain breathtaking today; in an era when automakers were still trying to sell the mass market on the concept of aerodynamic styling, they must have seemed impossibly avant-garde. And Carrosserie Saoutchik was always just a little more avant than the rest.

Jacques Saoutchik opened his Parisian coachbuilding shop in 1906; it didn’t last long after his death in 1955. His best designs have all of the swoops and curves of the other French operations -- Figoni et Falaschi, Portout, Bugatti, Franay and so on. But he always seemed to go further, to take an element or a theme and really run with it. Saoutchik’s 1938 Graham 97 left the art deco front of the car more or less untouched, but gave it wild parallel-opening doors (something of a Saoutchik trademark), a cabriolet top and a funky singular fin on the trunk. A 1949 Delahaye 175 S by the coachbuilder had a snout. His Hispano-Suiza H6C Dubonnet Xenia Streamliner seems more like a dieselpunk comic book fantasy then something actually built, and driven, in 1938.

Then there are the Saoutchik Cadillacs.

Saoutchik did a 1930 Cadillac V16, but that must have been before the absinthe really kicked in. Aside from its full-length sunroof, it’s a fairly subtle job. Not so this 1948 Series 62 Cabriolet. Perhaps sensing that the coachbuilding age was winding down in the years following WWII, and hungry for American money, Saoutchik stepped away from Delayahes for a bit and worked up two cars on Series 62 chassis.

Both are very flamboyant, and both are very purple. One had a three-position convertible top and elaborate lavender canework painted on the doors. This car, built for New York furrier Louis Ritter (who also ordered a Saoutchik Talbot for good measure) is darker and, at least in my opinion, more dramatic. It’s been on my mind for years now; I can still recall seeing this car for the first time, probably at the Meadow Brook Concours d’Elegance, when I was just a kid. I was blown away by the design’s daring, especially compared to the grand but stern prewar American classics displayed nearby. It's a car meant to be owned and driven by someone interesting, and definitely extroverted.

No, It doesn’t look anything like a Cadillac at first glance. But that’s part of what makes it so cool: If not for the wheels, the interior and the little Cadillac crest on the front, you’d be hard-pressed to say what you were looking at, but there’s something distinctly American about its scale. It’s downright massive next to the European cars of its era, and reportedly quite a comfortable cruiser, thanks to its V8. And it somehow manages to have more chrome than the Harley Earl-styled factory version! Have the French out-chromed the Americans since? I seriously doubt it.

Any way you slice it, this four-wheeled fantasy is a totally unique beast, a no-holds-barred reinterpretation of an American classic by a bold master of coachbuilding in the twilight years of the craft. The photos, nice as they are, really don’t do it justice.

The car will be sold alongside a wide-ranging and well-selected group of lots at RM Sotheby’s “Icons 2017” sale in New York on Dec. 6. Unless I come into some money real soon, it’s looking like it’s going to be driving off into another private collection; estimated sale price is between $850,000 and $1,000,000. Hopefully it will make its way back to the show circuit -- I'd love to see it on the concours field again. Or better yet, on the road.

SOURCE: Autoweek

AUTHOR: Graham Kozak