We Visit Mullin’s Auto Museum And Take A Picturesque Look Into The Art Of Bugatti

If you’re an art collector, you may have just missed out on your chance to own a modern work of art – a new Bugatti Veyron.

Because at a Southern California museum, you can see where the family lineage for the Veyron, most noted for its speed and technological achievements, started. And it actually started with some really beautiful chairs.

The Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Calif. is currently exhibiting “The Art of Bugatti” through the end of March. While it contains dozens of cars, the exhibit ties in numerous pieces of sculpture, paintings and furniture from the Bugatti family – and a clear family connection between the artwork and the cars.

Docent Rick Eberst took me on a tour recently of the exhibit and went over the vast collection of cars and pieces of art, including sculptures and paintings, created by the Bugatti family around the turn of the 20th century. And it’s here where you can see how they all tie in to each other.

Peter Mullin has one of the most extensive collections of Bugattis and French cars, many of which are always on display at the museum – when they’re not on loan to some other museum or he and his wife aren’t actually driving them. Over the years, he’s curated this vast collection, and opened this museum about an hour north from Los Angeles near the Pacific Ocean.

The highlights: The 1930 Club Car, a favorite of Mullin’s wife, who painted it the color of one of her Hermès dresses. She drives it regularly when it isn’t in the museum.

The 57SC Atlantic is a stunner of the exhibit, one of only two left. It’s also unlike the one Ralph Lauren has in his collection in that the rivets holding the magnesium body panels together are as Bugatti intended them, not spaced equidistant from each other to please the perfectionists. This car won Best Of Show in 2003 at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, an event Mullin is a large supporter of. Its lines are reminiscent of the crouching panther designed by Ettore’s brother, Rembrandt.

Perhaps the most ambitious car is the Type 64, which was just a chassis from 1939 until 2013, when Mullin brought together a team of metal stampers, design students and historians to determine what the car might have looked like had it been completed by Ettore’s son Jean, who was killed in a car crash. The body they designed hangs over the completed chassis.

There’s also a Peugeot Type BP1 Bébé part of the collection, one of Ettore’s first designs that he ended up selling to Peugeot. It, too, ended up with some racing successes of its own.

And a few cars from the Schlumpf family of collectors are on display, still in their decaying condition, including a Bugatti Shooting Brake.

Ettore Bugatti clearly had an artistic talent, which is why it’s somewhat of a shock he considered himself inferior to his father Carlo and younger brother Rembrandt, the Bugattis responsible for the chairs and sculptures in the exhibit – a crushing blow to Ettore, according to Eberst. The elephant on the hood of the 1941 Type 41 Royale was designed by Rembrandt, in keeping with his long history of making animal sculptures.

The family thinking was that if they didn’t have it, they designed it, Eberst said. That explains the thinking behind the Bugatti airplane, pieces of which are on display while the rest of it is being recreated by a group in the midwest. So in addition to being technologically advanced for the time, Bugatti’s cars were also beautifully finished. It was rare then, and rare now, for cars regardless of the price to hit the form and function targets dead on.

The Mullin museum is, coincidently, not too far from the Volkswagen Group’s huge West Coast research and development facility. You’d think some people on the Bugatti team would be at the museum all of the time.

The Art of Bugatti has public days February 28, March 14 and March 28. Hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and tickets must be purchased in advance through their website. Private tours can be arranged by contacting info@mullinautomotivemuseum.com or calling (805) 385-5400.

Photos: Zac Estrada/Carscoops & Michael Furman Photography/Mullin Automotive