Do you like the idea of contemporary art, but prefer it not to be standing still? Fifty years ago, French racing driver and art fan Hervé Poulain supplied the answer. A privateer regular at the Le Mans 24-hour race, Poulain wanted his BMW entry to stand out. He turned to his friend Alexander Calder, the renowned American sculptor, to paint Poulain's 3.0 CSL. And so began a long relationship between the German marque and the contemporary art world. To mark the 50 yeas since the first of the BMW art cars, there's a world tour. To save you the trouble of travelling, here’s all 20 BMW art cars:
Alexander Calder, BMW 3.0 CSL (1975)
The first and original of the BMW art cars, raced at Le Mans in 1975, beginning what’s now a tradition. Calder was best known for his huge mobiles, so mobile art, you might say, came easy to him. Idea is that the CSL, surely an artwork in itself, is moving even when it’s standing still. “AC” signature to rear quarters.
Frank Stella, BMW 3.0 CSL (1976)
Stella was obsessed with geometrics and regular shapes in his minimalist pieces, a collection of which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here Frank Stella has meticulously painted a monochrome grid - as if out of a graph book - onto the CSL, to underline racing's technical nature.
Roy Lichtenstein, BMW 320i Group 5 (1977)
Pop artist Lichtenstein’s huge, cartoon-like works define an era of American art, often using dots to make his chosen image. For the bewinged Group 5 320i, those dots form the sky around a rising sun to each side of the BMW, while along bonnet and roof, the artists’s signature work is a take on racing stripes.
Andy Warhol, BMW M1 (1979)
Of course there had to be a BMW art car by the artist whose Factory mass produced masterpieces, often silk screened. Here, Warhol characteristically went in the opposite direction, hand painting one of BMW’s mid-engined supercars with a roughness that suggests slap-dash and speed. Brilliant, of course.
Ernst Fuchs, BMW 635 CSi (1982)
Lesser known than his BMW car-artist predecessors, Fuchs was a founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. Here a fantastical rabbit leaps across flame-like shapes on the BMW’s bonnet, those flames speeding out of wheel arches and along roof and boot. Firey, fast.
Robert Rauschenberg, BMW 635 CSi (1986)
Pre-pop artist Rauschenberg specialised in collages mixing newspaper images with raucous brushwork, and in sculptures of everyday objects. Here, there’s a reclining Renaissance figure to the door, combining - as in his static artwork - with contemporary images, against a white background.
Michael Nelson Jagamara, BMW M3 Group A (1989)
Vibrant indigenous Australian art was the signature style of Jagamara, a pioneer of contemporary Aboriginal Australian art, who used ancient tradition to inform his work. This BMW, signed to the lower part of the sides, combines that evocative antiquity with the uncompromising racing shape of the M3.
Ken Done, BMW M3 Group A (1989)
Playful, almost childlike, Done’s images of Australian life have won him a huge following, his work also available in a range of homeware. Done's high colour, high power transfer of the energy of his art to automobile offers - even standing still - a sense of the heat of competition.
Matazo Kayama, BMW 535i (1990)
Best known for his Japanese-influenced cat paintings, Kayama incorporated elements of cubism into his superficially figurative art. For BMW’s high performance 535i saloon, shimmering images of wind and water, suitably a little abstracted, add notes of quiet and calm to your road trip to Berlin.
César Manrique, BMW 730i (1990)
If you’ve ever been to Lanzarote, you’ll have seen favourite son Manrique’s work adorning just about every urban roundabout, while his home is a veritable James Bond lair. Bold abstract colours are very much in the Manrique style and invite island sunshine to the skin of a piece of high-end German engineering.
A. R. Penck, BMW Z1 (1991)
Art world calls Penck a neo-expressionist. We say his broad brush strokes and crudely painted figures invite comparisons with neolithic images which could hardly be further removed from hi-tech Z1 with doors that descend into sills. If a cave painter approached a blood red Z1, this, we feel would be the result.
Esther Mahlangu, BMW 525i (1991)
South Africa’s Ndebele art is the inspiration for Mahlangu’s world-renowned work, meticulously translating the high-colour geometrics found on traditional Ndebele dwellings into art. Esther Mahlangu’s application of this style to the equally geometric 525i shouldn’t work. It does.
Sandro Chia, BMW 3 Series Touring (1992)
Looking for avant garde? Here’s Italian painter and sculptor Sandro Chia to oblige. His scrawled faces across this racing 3 Series are slashed with lines, circles and colour as if this BMW is carrying way more than a driver and the BMW marque’s ambitions to win a race.
David Hockney, BMW 850CSi (1995)
One of the greatest living artists brings playful pop art to BMW’s high end coupé. Hockney imagines what’s beneath the skin of the 850CSi, from impressionistic views of engine to driver and eager dog in the back seat. His cartoon approach softens sometimes austere BMW design, making this one of our favourite art cars.
Jenny Holzer, BMW V12 LMR (1999)
Thought-provoking slogans - often in electronic displays or on huge billboards - are the meat and drink of American conceptual artist Holzer. For a BMW Le Mans racer, she’s reached for one of her best known aphorisms. “Protect me from,” it begins at the back and concludes with, “what I want” to the front.
Olafur Eliasson, BMW H2R (2007)
You wouldn’t expect Iceland’s Eliasson - best known in Britain for Weather Project with its sun and clouds at Tate Modern - to be conventional. So for BMW’s pioneering hydrogen-powered V12 racer, he removed the H2R’s body and created an ice sculpture above it, to be kept strictly frozen. Of course.
Jeff Koons, BMW M3 GT2 (2010)
Superstar artist Jeff Koons is as renowned for his stainless steel balloon animals as for his celebration of everyday objects such as vacuum cleaners. Oh, and a topiary sculpture of a puppy. Here, Koons has applied high speed high colour stripes to the M3 GT2 making sure that you’ll see it approaching in your rearview mirror.
Cao Fei, BMW M6 GT3 (2017)
GT3 racing car remains carbon black, honestly celebrating its hi-tech structure. Chinese digital artist Cao Fei adds augmented reality surround, different every time it's accessed by a dedicated app. Cao Fei’s concept is to challenge the very notion of what an art car might or might not be.
John Baldessari, BMW M6 GTLM (2016)
A conceptual artist who embraced the literal, along with found images and bright colours. Here, the M6 GTLM Le Mans racer has confident primary coloured accents and the simple instruction/explanation to the doors. “Fast”. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Julie Mehretu, BMW M Hybrid V8 (2023)
Newest of BMW art cars is this Le Mans racer by Ethiopian-American Mehretu, best known for brightly coloured abstract landscapes, expressed in a series of lines. After attending the Daytona 24-hour, Mehretu decided to find out what the Hybrid V8 would look like if it had driven through one of her paintings. This is the extraordinary result.
Next up: The fastest BMW sports cars of all time.
