Design, art and desire

PHAIDON doesn’t normally publish books about motorcycles. Claude Monet, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso are more at home as subjects for the art house publisher than combustion-powered bicycles. But now, after several years in the making, the publisher has released The Motorcycle: Design, Art and Desire, which charts the design evolution of the motorcycle from the early steam-powered machines to the futuristic concepts of today.

The book – which hit the shelves at the end of November – also serves as a catalogue to an exhibition which was scheduled to run at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Australia. Of course, Covid knocked that on the head and so the exhibition is soon to go virtual as well as in person.

The Motorcycle looks and feels like a gallery: formatting is clean and minimal, images of machines are uncluttered and given centre stage, and so we see