Painting Bizzarrini into Automobile History

by Wallace Wyss – 

Car artists have their favorites, sometimes too much. They like Porsches but hate Mercedes, or they like Italian cars but hate German cars. It’s like that.

Having been a car artist since 2009, I gravitated toward Italian cars but stuck to brands like Ferrari where I knew there was a market for art. Allow me to present a bit of background. So at least half a century ago I was a budding poet, had won a national poetry award and thought “This is my life’s destiny.” Then I went to a University library in search of a poetry journal only to find a copy of Motorsport, a British magazine, which had a story on an obscure Italian race car called “Iso Grifo A3/C,” this being Iso’s first race car, separate from their four-seater coupe, the Iso Rivolta.

I had never seen a car so wanton, so rakish, almost obscene. It was like encountering a streetwalker in 8-in high heels. What amazed me then was that it had a Chevy V8 as its stock engine, with non-European sounding things like an iron block, pushrod valves. Detroit crudity in an exotic. I forgot poetry and instantly became a car guy. A couple years later I was writing car ads in Detroit and a boss at the agency mentioned an obscure Italian car was down at a local Corvette shop and he suggested I might want to take a look at it.

It was a Bizzarrini Targa. Long story short, the Iso company, which had started with the tiny Isetta “Bubble Car” during the Suez oil crisis, had hired an engineer (ex-Ferrari) named Giotto Bizzarrini to do a four-seater saloon, which he did. But to keep him happy since he was coming from a firm heavy into racing, they indulged him in building a two-seater race car on a shortened Iso Rivolta chassis. This race cars were raced at Le Mans where it hung in there with the Ferraris enough to finish 9th in 1965 (and first in its class). But the owner of Iso, Renzo Rivolta, didn’t like the race car’s aluminum body – too expensive to build– so he had a tamer design, the Iso Grifo, done by Bertone Carrozzeria, whose in-house designer, was a young man named Giorgetto Giugiaro.

Bizzarrini had designed another street car with a lower cost body of steel, and unfortunately tamer in looks, called the Grifo (for the mythical Griffon). That car bored Bizzarrini so he quit, with the idea of joining a firm that liked to race.

He joined ATS and they made a mid-engine car, very exciting, and still beautiful today but like many a new firm, they couldn’t handle the expenses and were a completely unknown firm.

There were one or two other adventures like designing a V12 engine for a tractor maker who wanted to build sports cars that would rival Ferrari. That was Lamborghini.

But he still wanted to build cars under his own name. Why not the Iso Grifo race car? Now you are probably asking why did he think he could use the chassis and body design? Because fortuitously he had registered the designs under his name. So he owned them. And Renzo Rivolta really had no intention of making race cars so he reluctantly let him have the designs as long as Bertone could continue to use the Grifo name.

The car I saw in Detroit was one of three Bizzarrini open cars, not regular models, and I tried to buy it but the young man who owned it wouldn’t answer my entreaties. Flash forward a few years, I’m in North Hollywood, driving down the street near a movie studio when outside a bar I see an emerald green Bizzarrini. I pull over and go into the bar and ask “Who owns that green car?” A craggy-faced guy about 65 looks up from his whiskey and says gruffly “I do.” So I meet Carey Loftin, a movie stunt driver, who it turns out, in succession, owned five of them, all  maintained by Max Balchowsky, an eccentric race car driver and mechanic who is famous for building a series of Buick powered race cars called “Old Yeller.”

Later on, I join the fledgling Iso Bizzarrini Owner’s Club and started making rosters of Bizzarrinis and Isos. Then at a Ferrari owner’s convention I met a New York apartment house owner who met weekly with a cabal of fellow enthusiasts. Conversations would go like this:

“Hey, Al, I gotta Ghibli comin’ in from the Coast”

“Manual or automatic”

“Manual, SS, yellow”

A price would be tossed out, accepted and somewhere in America an 18-wheeler would come to a screeching halt and a svelte sports car offloaded to another truck going toward the buyer’s city. So some I bought in the West took a very zig-zag path to the East. They liked my knowledge of cars and would send me all over the country to look for them.

So besides Rolls Royces, Ferraris, and Maseratis, I bought three or four of these Bizzarrinis. The best one was white, belonging to a club member, who bought it new in Italy. I didn’t even talk price. I just showed up at his desert house and said  ”I’m here for the car” handed him a cashier’s check for $60,000 and drove it away. I drove the beejesuz out of it until the tractor trailer came to pick it up.

Then there was one all apart, sold by a guy who had started a restoration on it but didn’t want to continue. The third was none other than one of Carey Loftin’s cars.

Here’s how that deal went down. The Iso Bizzarrini club was invited by Loftin’s gracious wife to lunch at his beach townhouse.

At the party, I kept thinking that the party would end with him showing us his latest cars. Instead, guests began to leave. So I up and said “Do you still have any of your old cars?” He said “Yup” and led me outside to the garage and opened the door to reveal a dusty old BizzArrini, with the dashboard all ripped up. His wife had volunteered to sew it but probably discovered sewing leather was not like sewing cloth.

I called my New York contact and a week later went back with a cashier’s check and a flatbed truck. His wife was crying as I towed the car out onto a flatbed, realizing owning five of those exotic Bizzarrinis had, over the years, earned her husband a lot of movie work, such as driving the Mustang in Bullitt. His counter-argument was that he was over 80 and movie jobs weren’t coming his way anymore.

The fourth Bizzarrini I found in a small Ohio town, parked outside for at least two winters. Rusty under its alloy skin. But my New York customer wanted it. The local bank manager was incredulous that the local loser owned such a treasure but they took the check and I took the car. That was one flaw in our buying arrangement. I would take a check and if the car wasn’t worth it, I couldn’t wait for a second check that was a lower offer, I just bought it.

A Beret Beckons

Somewhere along the way I reinvented myself as a fine artist. Flash forward to 2009, I am a car book author. One day I plan to go to the Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive car show, carrying my latest book on Shelby. Prior to the show I decide to make an oil portrait of Carroll Shelby, the subject of the book, I go to the show, book in hand, and sell it. As I am autographing it, I mention I have an oil portrait of Shelby back in the car and show the book buyer a photo of the painting. He says “Go get it. You sold that too.”

On the long walk to the car, I tell myself “You gotta learn to make prints. You can’t sell your originals.” So now it’s 2026, and I’ve painted over 100 car portraits, I have clients around the world that commission portraits of their cars and galleries displaying my work.

Most of my work is Ferraris, with the occasional Maserati or Porsche. I even did a run of prewar streamline modern cars. Then one day I had an epiphany. “Why,” I asked myself, ” is there no Bizzarrini art?” It figures. First, the brand was ignored by all except a few cognoscenti for fifty years. When I was in Ferrari clubs they looked down on them, not aware that Giotto Bizzarrini engineered a Ferrari that all of them worshipped–the Ferrari 250GTO. Now there are some beautifully restored ones appearing. But there’s no art, no jackets, no memorabilia. Histories appear now and then but die off, going out of print. But I continue to paint portraits of them.

I’ve even started sewing cloth prints of the paintings onto leather jackets for those clients who order a big canvas. I realize full well that I  may be going down a road no serious car artist would travel, celebrating a marque still totally unknown and totally unrecognized by 99% of enthusiasts. But I still feel a small sense of pride when I sell a work depicting a Bizzarrini–pride that this obscure marque, once lambasted by Ferrari folk as being low class because it is powered by a common-as-dirt Chevy V8, has emerged to become celebrated and some are worth a lot more than V12-powered Ferraris of the same model year…

It’s the least I can do…

 

Let us know what you think in the Comments.

 

THE AUTHOR/ARTIST Wallace Wyss is hoping to hear from galleries who would like to display his art. He can be reached at photojournalistpro2@gmail.com