Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: What was the first car to be added to New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a permanent display?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you’re right.
The idea that form follows function is the principle that an object’s shape should be determined by its intended purpose. It’s logical, typically efficient, and generally results a severe and occasionally institutional ascetic in the expression of that function in the design.
In the automotive world, we’ve seen designs follow this canon, most notably from companies such as Mercedes Benz  whose cars were stately and handsome, but rarely beautiful in the traditional sense of the word. Over the years New York’s Museum of Modern Art has chosen to celebrate and honor a number of these companies by way of special exhibits, as well as a handful of cars on permanent display. The latter of those first took to the Museum floor in the early nineteen seventies, and the initial choice was one that I think we all can agree upon is a perfect representation of functional design .
From the MoMA Blog:

MoMA was the first art museum to collect and exhibit automobiles as examples of functional design. The Cisitalia “202” GT (1946) was the first vehicle to enter the collection, in 1972, and MoMA has organized nine automotive exhibitions, beginning with the landmark presentation Eight Automobiles in 1951.

If truth is beauty and ergo beauty may be equated with truth, then the Cisitalia tells no lies. Since that first acquisition, MoMA has added a Jeep, Volkswagen Type 1, Jaguar E-Type, Ferrari 641/1 F1 car, and most recently, a Smart ForTwo to their permanent collection.
Image: MoMA