Crimp my ride

This is one man’s vision of what you’d get if Picasso had been a car designer.

Mad Brit … if that’s not a tautology … mechanic and customiser Andy Saunders has taken a perfectly innocent Citroen 2CV and turned it into something he calls `Picasso’s Citroen’.

There are some who would argue the 2CV is enough of an oddity to start with.

And of course there are also those who would argue that it’s already a work of art, and was the kicking off point for a stream of unparalleled Citroen design.

But we know where most of you latter mob are, and it’s only a matter of time — and having enough white vans and looooong-armed jackets — until we round you all up and put you somewhere to protect what’s left of your sanity. And the safety of the gene pool.

The bog standard 2CV was originally designed in the 1930s (although not made until the late 1940s) from a brief said to read something like “an umbrella on four wheels that would allow two peasants to drive 100kg of produce to market at 60km/h in clogs and across muddy dirt roads”.

It sold its socks off during the next 30 years, during the post-war era when legislation dictated that the French to buy five per household, consume several kilos of cheese every day, look down their noses at the rest of the world and blow up surplus islands and yachts in Pacific waters.

The car’s name is an acronym for `deux chevaux vapeur’ (two steam horses – giving an idea of what a powerhouse you could expect for your hard-earned francs) but it was given a parade of nicknames over time:

And it continued to sell, despite quality plummeting and its red-faced makers trying to have it killed off on a regular basis.

However, the 2CV’s popularity is often ascribed to it being given purely utilitarian lines that were later hailed as being the very essence of form following function and a triumph of minimalism.

Now Saunders has taken its simple body and turned it into a nightmare of cubism, inspired by Picasso’s famous Portrait of Dora Maar – one of the legendary artist’s mistresses, who apparently entranced him with her aquiline nose and the two eyes skewed on one side of it.

“I decided to try and blur the line between car design and art by using Picasso as an inspiration,” Saunders says.

He worked for about six months in altering every panel on the car, moving them off kilter and skewing their relationship to each other. The boot and grille are now off centre, and the two headlights are – of course – sitting on one side.

Amazingly, you can still drive it, but it’s deemed roadworthy only for daytime use because of the headlight arrangement.

The car will be auctioned at the end of this month in Britain.