BMW_Art Cars_Brochure

BMW Art Car photo by Lydia Marcus

Photographed February 24, 2009 at Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA)

As seen on my blog: fotonomous.blogspot.com/2009/02/bmw-art-cars-lacma.html

 

I'm not alone when I say that I view many cars as art. BMW has produced plenty of cars that fit into this category (take a look at a 70's era 3.0 CSI or an 80's era 635 CSI and you'll know what I'm talking about). In 1975 BMW decided to put their artwork into the hands of major artists to turn the cars into one-of-a-kind vehicles called BMW Art Cars. I look at it as art squared.

 

The BMW Art Car Project was originally conceived by the French racecar driver Hervé Poulain, who in 1975 commissioned American artist Alexander Calder to paint his BMW racing car. Since then, prominent artists throughout the world have designed sixteen BMW Art Cars, based on both racing and production vehicles.

 

I'm really excited that I'll be able to view and photograph four of these special cars at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Cars designed by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg will be briefly on display from Feb 12 to Feb 24, 2009 outside at the BP Grand Entrance. Get there soon before they race off! - Lydia Marcus

 

As seen on my blog: fotonomous.blogspot.com/2009/02/motoring-imagination.html

 

LACMA is the first U.S. venue stop in a major, worldwide tour of the cars; they next appear in New York City's historic Grand Central Terminal before heading to a three-city museum tour in Mexico.

 

For Andy Warhol, the actual painting of the car became a performance piece, done by his own hand live before cameras as a publicity event. Warhol approached the car with a carefree spirit and an uncharacteristic interest in a sort of "action painting." The car, a BMW M1, is covered with multicolored areas of paint that suggest movement (blurred particularly at racing speeds), but also perhaps individual side panels taken from different cars. This greatly oscures the overall form of the car. With the handle edge of the brush, Warhol scraped lines into the painted surfaces, implying wind moving over the surface but also further de-materializing the surface of this fine racing car. "I adore the car," Warhol said after he'd finished. "It's much better than a work of art." Certainly from a formal perspective much differs from Warhol's paintings, which were often achieved with the use of stencils or silkscreens with a prescribed order. - Christopher Mount, Design Historian and Curator (From the LACMA catalogue BMW ART CARS February 12-24, 2009)

 

Robert Rauschenberg took a completely different approach, not attempting to play with the materiality or non-materiality of the car or suggest speed, wind, or movement like the others. Instead his painting is static and approaches a painted car from an almost educational point of view. "I think mobile museums would be a good idea," he said. "This car is the fulfillment of my dream." Renowned for his use of collage and a multiplicity of materials and forms, Rauschenberg employed a kind of appropriation in his BMW 635 CSi. The most humorous of the automobiles, Rauschenberg painted the hubcaps as though they were fragile antique plates and reproduced Bronzino's famous Portrait of a Young Man on one side of the car and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' Le Grande Odalisque on the other. In a reference to the posssible ecological damage caused by the proliferation of automobiles, the artist included his own photographs of flowers, trees, and swamp grass to the hood and roof. - Christopher Mount, Design Historian and Curator (From the LACMA catalogue BMW ART CARS February 12-24, 2009)

 

A car enthusiast and collector, Frank Stella employed the most rational approach to the painting of his BMW 3.0 CSL. "My design is like a blueprint transferred to the bodywork," he said, and in fact the graph paper-inspired decoration suggests a two-dimensional drawing inflated to three dimensions. Stella sought inspiration from the car's technical drawings and found this to be the "most agreeable solution." However, this is not truly a technical exercise, and Stella references his own sculptures and drawings with the recurring appearance of the French curve and other forms taken from an architect's drawing table. - Christopher Mount, Design Historian and Curator (From the LACMA catalogue BMW ART CARS February 12-24, 2009)

 

Like the Stella, Roy Lichtenstein's automobile (BMW 320i) incorporates an artistic vocabulary familiar to him (including Benday dots and flat areas of color), but also adapts to the unusualness of the assignment. He said, "I pondered on it for a long time and put as much into it as I possibly could....I wanted the lines I painted to be a depiction, the road showing the car where to go." Again the modulated strip of color indicates movement and wind traveling from front to back of the car. However, Lichtenstein goes further conceptually: "the design also shows the countryside through which the car has traveled....One could cal it an enumeration of eveyrthing a car experiences - only that this car reflects all of these things before they actually have been on the road." On one side a rising sun, and over the rest a depiction of the natural and physical forces that car encounters on its daily journeys. - Christopher Mount, Design Historian and Curator (From the LACMA catalogue BMW ART CARS February 12-24, 2009)

 

 

 

Done