Motorcycle Art: Art Deco Henderson KJ Streamline Model

Art Deco was an innovative and distinctive style of design that spanned the boom times of the Roaring Twenties and the bust of the Depression-ridden 1930s. It was the style of the flapper girl and the office typist, of the factory worker and daredevil car driver.

Art Deco was avant-garde. It celebrated the newly mechanized modern world, yet embraced everthing from everyday manufactured products to exclusive works of art. It was everywhere, from cinemas to skyscrapers, from luxury ocean liners to exotic automobiles — and, yes, to some motorcycles, too.

What is arguably the most resolutely Art Deco motorcycle ever built emerged in the United States in 1935 as the one-off creation of a Michigan-based metalsmith employed at the Oldsmobile car factory. The bike was based on his 1,300cc 4-cylinder 1930 Henderson KJ Streamline model. His name was O. Ray Courtney (the O was for Orley, which he preferred to ignore), and though little is known of him, he built a handful of completely innovative custom motorcycles during his life, their style evoking the idyllic sense of optimism prevalent in the early 1950s, of a nation basking in the contentment of the postwar era.

Ray Courtney