BMW Art Cars On Show

LACMA HOSTS FOUR BMW ART CARS BY WARHOL, STELLA, LICHTENSTEIN, AND RAUSCHENBERG; FIRST U.S. VENUE IN WORLDWIDE TOUR
10/02/2009

Rare, behind-the-scenes video footage of the artists complements the installation
Los Angeles - The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents an installation of BMW Art Cars designed by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg from February 12-24, 2009. The cars will be on view in the BP Grand Entrance, an admission-free area of the museum's campus. LACMA is the first U.S. venue in a major worldwide tour of the cars; they next appear in New York City's historic Grand Central Terminal, March 24-April 6, before heading to a three-city museum tour in Mexico.

“We are pleased that the BMW Art Cars have returned to LACMA. The David Hockney car was on exhibition as part of David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective in 1996 and we are eager to welcome this wider selection by some of the world’s most celebrated artists to the museum,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director.

Rare, behind-the-scenes footage of the four cars will also be on display, complementing the presentation. The videos reveal a young Warhol constructing his car, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg discussing their inspirations and influences in creating their respective pieces, and various experts including Hervé Poulain, the race car driver and initiator of the Art Car Project, discussing the resulting impact of these works.

“Art, architecture, and design are very important to our daily business,” said Chris Bangle, BMW Chief Designer. “We are proud that some of the most respected artists in the world have interpreted their thoughts and their points of view through our cars. It is an interesting and inspiring process and we always look forward to the moment an artist draws the curtain.”

The BMW Art Car Project was originally conceived by the French racecar driver Hervé Poulain, who had the idea of inviting an artist to use an automobile as a canvas. In 1975, Poulain commissioned American artist Alexander Calder to paint his BMW racing car. Since then, prominent artists throughout the world have joined the elite cast of Calder, Stella, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, and have designed sixteen BMW Art Cars, based on both racing and regular production vehicles. The most recent contributors to the BMW Art Car program are David Hockney (1995), Jenny Holzer (1999), and Olafur Eliasson (2007). New artists are chosen by a prestigious panel of international judges, and BMW is currently in discussions for the development of the seventeenth art car.

“BMW’s Art Cars have become a medium of expression for some of the world’s most distinguished artists and there is no better place to showcase these cars than at LACMA, which is ideally situated in a region that dedicates equal passion to art and driving,” noted Christopher Mount, design historian.

BMW Art Cars have been exhibited by numerous museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Louvre in Paris, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao. Aside from being displayed at their home base at the BMW Museum in Munich, BMW Art Cars will continue to be shown at future international exhibitions. In 2006, they were sent on an extensive tour of Asia, which took them to Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Korea, Australia, India, Taiwan, China, Russia and Africa. The Art Cars will continue to be exhibited worldwide through 2010.

LACMA’s permanent collection includes key works by the four artists whose art cars will be displayed, including Warhol’s Black and White Disaster, Stella’s Getty Tomb, Lichtenstein’s Cold Shoulder, and Rauschenberg’s print, Booster.

About BMW and Contemporary Art

BMW has a long-standing commitment to contemporary art starting with Gerhard Richter’s 1972 commission of three large-scale paintings for the foyer of the company headquarters in Munich. Karl Schwanzer’s architectural post-war icon, the “four cylinder” building, marked the beginning of the company’s emphasis on an innovative, dynamic style of construction which was extended in 2005 with the central building of the new BMW Leipzig Plant, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. BMW has been engaged in the sponsorship of cultural formats for more than thirty years with hundreds of international commitments. In each endeavor, the utmost importance is attached to total freedom of creative potential—recognizing that this is just as much a guarantee for groundbreaking achievements in art as it is for the most crucial innovations within a successful business enterprise.

About LACMA
Since its inception in 1965, LACMA has been devoted to collecting works of art that span both history and geography—and represent Los Angeles’ uniquely diverse population. Today, the museum features particularly strong collections of Asian, Latin American, European, and American art, as well as a new contemporary museum on its campus, BCAM. With this expanded space for contemporary art, innovative collaborations with artists, and an ongoing transformation project, LACMA is creating a truly modern lens through which to view its rich encyclopedic collection.
 
General Information: LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036. For more information about LACMA and its programming, call 323 857-6000 or visit lacma.org.
 
Museum Hours and Admission: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, noon–8 pm; Friday, noon–9 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am–8 pm; closed Wednesday. Adults $12; students 18+ with ID and senior citizens 62+ $8; children 17 and under are admitted free. Admission (except to specially ticketed exhibitions) is free the second Tuesday of every month and on Target Free Holiday Mondays. After 5 pm, every day the museum is open, LACMA’s “Pay What You Wish” program encourages visitors to support the museum with an admission fee of their choosing.








 

The BMW Art Car by Andy Warhol, 1979

"I love that car. It has turned out better than the artwork…I have tried to give a vivid depiction of speed. If a car is really fast, all contours and colours will become blurred." Andy Warhol

A person who creates art from images of soup cans or aspires to have a department store closed so that it may be preserved as a museum for posterity would not see any conflict between technology and creativity. Consequently, instead of first designing a scale model and leaving the final completion to his assistants, the pop art legend painted the BMW M1 from the beginning to the end himself.

Hervé Poulain, the French auctioneer, race car driver, and initiator of the Art Car series, said of Warhol, "When all is said and done, he had a brilliant idea of communication. He had covered up the car in a sort of camouflage. He completely ignored the actual beauty of the car. The warlike aspect of the car was not really something for BMW or for me. It had a certain sense of humor and irony, rather biting.  It was an extraordinary provocation."

Born in Pittsburgh in 1928, Andy Warhol studied from 1945 to 1949 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He began his career as a commercial artist and achieved a solo exhibition in New York as early as 1952. In 1956 his work was acknowledged with the coveted Art Director's Club Award. 1962 saw the creation of the legendary "Factory"-a reversal of traditional artistic ideas as had never been seen before. His celebrity portraits and paintings of objects became famous. Warhol died in New York in 1987.

This work of art on wheels was employed in racing for the first and last time in the 24-hour race at Le Mans in 1979. The M1 designed by Warhol started on the grid with the number 76 and was driven by the German Manfred Winkelhock as well as Hervé Poulain and Marcel Mignot from France. They achieved a sixth place in the overall rating and second place in their class.

The BMW Art Car by Roy Lichtenstein, 1977

"I wanted the lines I painted to be a depiction of the road showing the car where to go. The design also shows the countryside through which the car has travelled. One could call it an enumeration of everything a car experiences - only that this car reflects all of these things before actually having been on a road." Roy Lichtenstein

In Roy Lichtenstein's Art Car, the scenery, the car, and its movement become one entity. Clearly influenced by the artist's comic-style works, the car features long colored strips that function as "speedlines," a feature used in comics to suggest rapid motion. Even the oversized dots used by Lichtenstein, the Ben-Day dots, are reminiscent of his famous comic-strip pictures.
    
The harmony achieved between predetermined aerodynamic features and free composition is pure Lichtenstein. It is an expression of his artistic credo: art must also be considered an element of everyday life - its themes and inspiration must come from the lives of ordinary people.

Born in New York in 1923, Roy Lichtenstein is considered to be one of the founders of American pop art. Educated at the Art Students League in New York City and Ohio State University, he produced early works ranging from cubism to expressionism. Lichtenstein became interested in popular culture, such as comics and advertising, in the late 1950s, which led to his iconic use of enlarged Ben-Day dots. He died in New York in 1997.

Roy Lichtenstein's Art Car was able to celebrate its completion twice - as a work of art at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and as a racing car in the 24-hour race at Le Mans in June 1977. The car was driven by Hervé Poulain and Marcel Mignot from France. The car, with the number 50, achieved a ninth place in the overall rating and finished first in its class.