AUTOMOBILES AS ART:
THE BLACKHAWK MUSEUM
Story and photography
by Margaret & Eric Anderson

The motto of the Blackhawk Museum, up in Danville an hour by car east of San Francisco, is "So many treasures! So close to home!" For San Diego museum enthusiasts that has never been more true. With Southwest intermittently offering its Friends Fly Free programs to Oakland, not only is this museum -- now affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution - close, but it's also inexpensive.

Becoming, as it were, Smithsonian West has broadened the range of Blackhawk. An on-going exhibit, for example, deals with Spiders; Gold Fever! will be running through August 25, 2002 and Produce For Victory (a display of 35 original World War II posters) continues till October 19, 2002. Coming in September are exhibits on the California Emigrant Trail and a hands-on one called Dinostories.

But, for all that, the main attraction of the Blackhawk museum is the collection of cars put together by Ken Behring, a wealthy real estate developer and world-famous philanthropist. Behring started his successful career as an automobile dealer in Wisconsin, created numerous planned communities in Florida and California including the one at Blackhawk, bought the Seattle Seahawk football team and founded the U.C. Berkeley Museum of Art, Science and Culture. In 1997 he pledged $20 million to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and, in 2000, an additional $80 million to rebuild the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. For only the fourth time in the Smithsonian's 170-year history, the prestigious James Smithson Award was bestowed on Behring in recognition of his generosity and vision.

Behring clearly had broad interests but no visitor has any doubts about his passion for the automobile. And in the Blackhawk Museum he created a gorgeous setting for his car collection. It's all brushed stainless steel and plate glass standing on massive galleries of black, ruby and pink Italian granite, lit by copper-hued German skylights and discrete lights that make the gallery interiors glow like "a jeweler's case." There are no backdrops, just black walls and ceilings that, with the stage lighting, both dramatize the cars and make photography difficult.

The array is priceless, "But," says Jon Hart, the museum's director of marketing and communications, and curator of the automotive exhibitions, " we want visitors to wonder about the creativity of the coachbuilders of the past not what the collection's dollar value might be today."