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If you could abandon practicality, performance and price and design cars solely with beauty in mind, you would find yourself in one period of automotive history -- the Art Deco movement of the 1920s through 1940s. Museum curator, Pebble Beach organizer and chief class judge as well as sometime Autoweek contributor Ken Gross loves the Art Deco movement and is celebrating it with a new exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh running from Oct. 1, 2016 to Jan. 15, 2017.

“Rolling Sculpture: Art Deco Cars From The 1930s and '40s” celebrates Art Deco cars and motorcycles of that period. It is the third Art Deco collection Gross has guest-curated (and his ninth automobile exhibition). The first Art Deco car exhibition was “Sensuous Steel” at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2013 and the second was “Sculpted in Steel” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, earlier this year. Both of them were very well-received.

For Raleigh, some of the cars are carried over, but some are new, including two motorcycles. So if you saw the other exhibitions, you’ll see something new in North Carolina. All celebrate one of the most fascinating periods in transportation design.

“During the Art Deco era (although it was not so named at the time), auto designers were fascinated with streamlined forms, aircraft-inspired details and the elegant minutia of Art Moderne design,” said Gross. "As a result, architecture, fashion, steamships, railroad locomotives, electric mixers, even pencil sharpeners were designed with streamlined (some called it “cleanlining’') elements."

Some time ago, Gross compiled a list of cars, and a few motorcycles, that he thought met this design criteria. Some were obvious, Gross said, like the Cord 810/812, with its elegant melange of angular and curvaceous forms. The Chrysler and De Soto Airflows, while not the sales success Chrysler anticipated, are fascinating to look at today -- especially when you compare their streamlined shapes and design nuances to fast passenger locomotives of their era. The Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow was built to win a design competition at the 1933, “A Century of Progress,” exhibition which was also called the Chicago World’s Fair. Duesenberg sent the Arlington Torpedo SJ sedan, often called the “Twenty Grand”; Cadillac countered with its “Aero-Dynamic” fastback coupe and Packard sent “The Car of the Dome.”

“But Pierce won,” Gross said. “With a brilliantly modern design that made the others, even the Cadillac, appear old-fashioned. We have one of those daring Silver Arrows in the exhibition; just three survive out of five built.”

Another change for the Raleigh exhibit is that Gross substituted a front-wheel-drive, low-slung 1930 Ruxton Model C Sedan with a Joseph Urban paint scheme for the ex-Frank Lloyd Wright L29 Cord that was in the earlier exhibits, and a Peugeot Darl’mat coupe for the Delahaye 135M Figoni coupe.

“But the design principles are the same,” Gross said. “These cars are sleek, curvaceous, bold and daring for their time -- and everywhere you look, there are Deco-inspired details.”

Also, the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles loaned its Figoni-bodied Delahaye 135M roadster as a substitute for Miles Collier’s similar car. But Bill Marriott’s Talbot-Lago T150-C-SS Teardrop is back again.

It’s not all French-bodied beauties, though.

“Visitors love the Stout Scarab,” Gross noted. “They have no trouble seeing it as the forerunner to the minivan, but people in the mid-1930s didn’t understand it, and its heady $5,000 price tag discouraged sales in the mid-Depression era.”

Other cars are unique in their designs.

“Andre Dubonnet’s one-off Hispano-Suiza, ‘Xenia,’ resembles an airplane without wings,” Gross said. “Aircraft designer Jean Andreau styled it and Jacques Saoutchik built it -- that’s a nice pedigree. Its trend-setting panoramic windshield, gull-wing side windows and cantilevered doors are frosting on the cake.”

Does it all define Art Deco?

“People have asked me to define Art Deco as it applies to automobiles. I think it’s like the judge who was asked to define p*rnography. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart didn’t try to define it. Instead, he said: 'I know it when I see it.'”

Gross suggested a “more dignified” description of the term came from Mark Scala, who was chief curator at the Frist Center exhibit: "While not easily defined, Art Deco in the broadest sense may be seen as a synthesis of the decorative ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Vienna Secession, with echoes of the art of classical antiquity, Cubist allusions to the simplicity and force of primitive sculpture, and the Futurists’ embrace of the machine age."

Gross added that “…the designers of these cars weren't concerned as much with function as they were obsessed with fashion. Fuel economy, safety, crash resistance, practicality, etc., were secondary to producing designs that, in their era, took one’s breath away — and many of them still do.”

Gross offers a third perspective on defining Art Deco when he quotes Gary Vasilash, editor-in-chief of Auto Design and Production magazine, “...the Art Deco style can be characterized as the combination of broad gesture and fine detail.”

Even in a large museum exhibit, though, you have to be selective.

“When you only have 17 objects in a museum exhibition, each must be a visual feast, with unique stories, perhaps famous owners, certainly noted engineers and designers, and a melange of the intricate details we love about Art Deco design. It goes without saying that fine craftsmanship, clever mechanical features -- like the disappearing headlights and the folding metal top on the Chrysler Thunderbolt -- and stunning style are important factors. Due to modern regulations, especially safety, fuel economy and certainly advanced electronics, we will never see cars built like this again, so it’s important to display them."

Among the most interesting items on display are the three motorcycles.

“There were not as many Art Deco motorcycles as cars,” Gross pointed out. “Although many Deco elements found their way into styling and engineering details. The Indian, with its flowing valenced fenders, shaped like a chief’s war bonnet, its clever use of two-tone colors (because DuPont was involved with Indian), and the sculptural details of the cooling fins on its four-cylinder engine, are perfect examples. O. Ray Courtney’s svelte streamlined Henderson motorcycle is unique and still remarkable, and BMW’s R7 Concept, with its fully enclosed streamlined bodywork, and the curious fact that it was lost for decades, is a perfect Art Deco story.”

So fire up the Delage and start planning a reason to go to Raleigh sometime between Oct. 1 and Jan. 15.