How a balloon-wheeled Citroen brought art to advertising

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Advertising sucks. Overwhelmingly rote and unimaginative, it’s a tax on our attention, a brazen push to consume, and a manipulative ploy to make us feel as though we lack. It doesn’t have to be this way, however. Creative advertising can be fun, like when the California Raisins got people humming Marvin Gaye again. Better still, creative advertising can be made artistic and abstract — or even so aesthetically pleasing that we go out of our way to display it ourselves. 

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A clean-slate car introduced with a clean-slate campaign, the marketing for the 1955 through 1976 Citroen D Series was a strong exercise in the latter. 

By shunning many of the tired embellishments of contemporary automobile marketing, the abstract sculpture and illustration of Citroen’s DS promos showed that advertising could carry actual cultural value, contribute to a strong brand legacy, and feed long-term desirability. Owing in part to this, the promotional corpus surrounding Flaminio Bertoni’s iconic MoMA-recognized design lives on today as an artistic expression all its own. 

The booming 1950s brought plenty of memorable designs, but the Citroen D Series (ID & DS, often simply “DS”) arrived a class apart from its rudimentary peers. Introduced to an era of vehicles that merely aped the jets of the day, the DS more closely imagined the spacecraft of tomorrow. And riding a groundbreaking new suspension system, it floated like an orbiter as well. 

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Already some 20 years ahead of its contemporaries when it debuted in 1955, the new Citroen combined futuristic styling with a cutting-edge oleo-pneumatic suspension system: instead of springs, a quartet of spheres filled with hydraulic oil and compressed nitrogen gas would absorb impacts and level the car. By controlling fluid pressure with a lever by their left leg, drivers could even select the vehicle’s ride height, raising the DS by up to a foot when extra clearance was necessary. 

It was a major milestone for the brand and the automotive industry as a whole. Its predecessor, the Traction Avant, ushered in the era of front-wheel-drive unibody compacts that dominates European roads to this day. Driver-controllable suspension, meanwhile, has only spread to the mainstream in more recent years — admittedly cautioned by the expense and maintenance complexities involved. This expanded use of hydraulics — once only used for power steering — to this ~2500-psi master circulatory system incorporating steering, clutch, braking, and versatile suspension made the Citroen DS one of the most sophisticated vehicles the world had yet seen. Indeed, it was so visionary that it’s now said that suits within Citroen itself feared for how it might be topped, and the company steered clear of clean-sheet designs for decades as a result. 

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Such a new sort of car demanded a new sort of introduction. Citroen tasked a young marketing outsider, Claude Puech, with the 1955 launch. He rejected traditional templates straight away. 

Whereas today’s auto marketing is overwhelmingly lifestyle, that of the mid-1950s was at once heavily descriptive and comically exaggerated. Walls of technical detail were punctuated with dramatic marketing labels for often-simple systems, many carrying the same enthusiastic promises that we hear today — albeit without the technologies to follow through. Imagine a fast-talking 1950s radio announcer espousing the endless promise of Dr. Quack’s Asbestos Seltzer, and you won’t be far off.

Against this industry backdrop of advertising hyperbole, Puech’s expression of Citroen opted for the avant garde. 

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By treating advertising as “a cultural act,” Puech’s marketing efforts moved the needle from instrumentalist to indulgent. Puech drew from the design-heavy languages of Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti, commissioning high-brow photographers, graphic designers, and typographers to develop promotional materials that matched the car’s futuristic flare with flamboyant glamour.

Brochures were loaded with vibrant forms and unconventional imagery, sometimes describing and abstracting the product in equal measure. Pastel-hued doors were photographed like handbags, with fashionable women modelling across a two-page spread. Dutch artist and Citroen 2CV fan Karl Suyling developed a series of designs for a poster campaign. Photographer Robert Delpire published a bimonthly company magazine featuring detail on Citroen products, photography from Magnum giants including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marc Riboud, and insight into subjects of technical interest ranging from ships to jet engines. 

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It wasn’t just paper either: Citroen quickly committed to the bit by turning the DS into a proper art piece. In a time when most product representations held literal, the DS’ depictions ventured places a car couldn’t, with show-floor and promo-photo installations. Parisian and Dutch showgoers, for instance, witnessed an early DS standing vertically as though on a subterranean launch pad, its wheel wells and underside faired smoothly over; later installations would mount the streamliner atop a plinth, flying up and into the future at a dramatic angle. GM may have been starting into the road-going Firebird concept series, but the everyday DS was already blasting off. 

Perhaps even more compelling than the spaceship was the DS sur ballons, an ID19 (identifiable by its white steering wheel) “floated” on a lake atop four large, red balloons. Assembled following a long series of ads and imagery playing with soft balloon motifs, the 1959 installation was devised to play up the “floating” character of the D-Series’ unique suspension. Celebrating a further milestone, the display bore the pale paint finish of recent European Rally Championship winner Paul Coltelloni’s ID 19 rally car, “Blonde Tortoiseshell.”

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Little appears to have been recorded or retold in secondary scholarship of the display’s initial conception and development, but surviving photos show its assembly. The car was floated into position on a platform assembled atop several small boats. Four adjustable stilts were driven into the lake bed beneath the car’s display position, after which the “balloons” were positioned beneath each faired-over wheel-well. Photographer Pierre Jahan took a high position to disguise the space between the balloons and the vehicle and snapped the now-iconic shot seen atop this article. Finally, the colour negative was developed, the car’s stilts likely edited out of the final image by airbrushing a print. 

To take a cynical view, it is all just marketing. That marketing-outsider Puech came from a sales background, and it was his job to make sure the cars moved through showrooms. The DS was presented as a progressive addition to a consumerist fantasy of the suave, modern jet-age lifestyle. More cynically, the product that the creative early ads peddled was deeply flawed, and the rushed development and construction of early cars wrought such endemic complications that dealers often towed disabled D-Series cars to and from dealerships under cover of darkness. 

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Still, in metal and on paper alike, the D-Series took a leap on an optimistic view of the future. Though still never as purely artistic as Puech’s teammate Delpire might’ve hoped, these 20 strong years of creative output broke the monotony of conventional advertising with something more stimulating. In a pre-CGI era when art took serious investment, Puech gambled on balancing consumers’ ad diets with something a little more intellectually and aesthetically nutritious, and it continues to pay dividends in brand recognition and desirability. 

Traditional marketing is typically an unwanted tax on our attention, but if that is a net cost to the masses, at least the contribution of creative and compelling multimedia brings some social value to the transaction. We know that creativity sells — sometimes with twice the per-dollar impact of unimaginative dross — and the example of Puech’s abstraction into cultural media is encouraging. 

More than just a burden to be skipped, scrolled past, or ignored, the enduring image of the DS sur ballons shows that such cultural expressions can transcend their consumerist function and live on to stimulate appreciative eyes. 

I certainly wouldn’t ever decorate my space with traditional advertising, after all, but the 1:12 scale model of the DS sur ballons in my living room? That piece is sculpture. 

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