Native Grounds
Citroën DS
by Luciano Vittori
On the banks of the Seine, with the Eiffel Tower as its witness, stands the car that cast France in steel. The Citroën DS — to the French simply *la Déesse*, the goddess — belongs nowhere better than here.
- TechniqueHahnemühle · Dibond
- Size100 × 75 cm
- EditionEdition of 24
- Price€995
The goddess and her cabriolet
When the DS was unveiled at the 1955 Paris Motor Show, it seemed to have rolled in from the future. The streamlining, the self-levelling hydropneumatic suspension, the front disc brakes and the headlamps that in later years would swivel with the steering — the public had never seen anything like it, and tens of thousands of orders were taken on the opening day alone. Designer Flaminio Bertoni and engineer Paul Magès had not built a car but a sculpture that happened to drive. By 1975 nearly one and a half million would leave the line.
The name itself is a pun that only works in French: 'DS' sounds like *déesse*, goddess. And of all the DS models, the open version is the rarest. Citroën built no cabriolet of its own; for that it turned to the Paris coachbuilder Henri Chapron, who finished the roofless cars by hand. From 1960 his *Cabriolet Usine* was even sold officially through Citroën dealers — yet in eleven years only some 1,300 left his workshop. Today the DS cabriolet is among the most sought-after French classics in existence.
Luciano Vittori returns her to her native ground: the Seine embankment, the autumn trees, Eiffel's tower behind. The fresco treatment turns the bodywork into a weathered surface, as though the goddess had stood in this spot for a century — timeless, French, and entirely at home.
