Roy Lichtenstein: 1977 BMW 320iIn 1975, American helicopters left Saigon. The Ramones released their first album. And BMW racer Hervé Poulain asked his pal Alexander Calder to throw a dab of paint on his Batmobile. The resultant 3.0 CSL—resplendent in red, yellow, and blue—didn’t finish the race, ultimately placing 44th. Few beyond hardcore racing fans remember the Mirage GR8 that ultimately won the race, but the Calder BMW is known to even the most casual of motorsport enthusiasts.
A.R. Penck: 1991 BMW Z1
Followed in short order by another CSL done up graph-paper style by Frank Stella, a flared-to-heck E21 bearing Roy Lichtenstein’s signature halftone dots, and an M1 liberally slathered in pigment by Andy Warhol, BMW’s Art Car program became a thing. While the earliest examples of the breed were racing machines, there have also been road cars in the mix. The pace of the program has slowed somewhat in the last decade and a half, with only Ólafur Elíasson’s hydrogen-powered H2R from 2007 and Jeff Koons’ 2010 M3 GT2 rolling out in the name of art.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the program, BMW is, somewhat predictably, turning to the almighty hashtag, sigil of our modern age. They’d like to know what it means to you, the aesthete. Or you, the gearhead. Or you, the angelheaded hipster overwhelmed by student debt and Uber fares. Wax lyrical and append #BMWArtCar. Now sally forth and tweet! Calder, who died not long after Poulain, Sam Posey, and Jean Guichet punted his creation down the Mulsanne straight, would undoubtedly be amused. The artist once said, “My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.” The intellectual level often exhibited via social channels would likely feel completely familiar to him.
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