BMW's costliest art car comes to India, to cost 'millions of dollars'

The car, which was painted by Andy Warhol in 1979, is on display in Delhi at the India Art Fair

Every year when Thomas Girst, BMW’s global head of cultural engagement, looks at the list of requests for exhibits amongst the group’s collection of ‘art cars’, it’s almost always the Andy Warhol or the Jeff Koons art cars that are requested the most.

This year Andy Warhol’s 1979 art car — the BMW M1 — has been brought to India, and is on display at the India Art Fair, taking place till 2 February in New Delhi. 

The BMW Art Car Project was born in 1975 when Le Mans racing driver Hervé Poulain decided to change the appearance of his BMW, Girst said, adding that the initiative was given a thumbs up by the then BMW Motorsport director Jochen Neerpasch, and artist Alexander Calder was assigned the task.

The project was so well received that over the years BMW roped in artists, such as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, to convert an assortment of BMWs into art cars. “The truly great thing is that these cars were not a public relations exercise but emerged from real racing passion,” Girst said.

The art cars have in time been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as well as other venues.

The M1 is often referred to as the most expensive car in the world given the pedigree of the creator. Andy Warhol paintings have sold for record highs that go up to $105 million and have averaged between $30 million and $80 million over the years, according to published reports by international auction houses. When asked about what’s the worth of the car in Delhi, Girst declines to answer, saying “it would easily be in the tens of millions of dollars.” 

 

 

What Girst does share is that Warhol was fascinated with the process of painting machines, and when he painted the car in 1979, he did it in 28 minutes using bright colours and streaks that looked like scratches all over the car. The point was to create a vivid effect of speed when it was in motion along with the fact that it was of course created in motion. 

To date, BMW has commissioned 19 art cars, with the recent ones being an M6, painted by John Baldessari in 2016, and an M6 GT3 painted by Chinese artist Cao Fei in 2017. 

All cars are the property of BMW and not for sale, Girst said when asked if they had ever received offers from art collectors around the world.  

What do those outside of the auto industry think of the concept? Artist Jitish Kallat said: “There is a whole art historical trail of artists engaging with the automobile industry as an image, as a cultural symbol and as form that points to our evolutionary story.” It is perhaps by drawing a strand from this lineage that BMW conceived this interesting collaboration between artists and the cars. That’s something Indian automobile manufacturers could easily replicate.