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The BMW Art Car Marks its 50th Anniversary

December 18, 2025

Pictured above: Andy Warhol’s creation is perhaps the most known BMW Art Car. While most artists in the series have worked with BMW’s team to transfer their design to a car, Warhol painted the car himself in one shot, with the aid of just one assistant. Applying 13 pounds of paint by hand to a BMW M1 Procar over the course of just 28 minutes, he said he was striving “to show speed as a visual image.”

To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of its iconic series of Art Cars, now 20 in number, BMW brought two stellar examples to the 2025 Pebble Beach Concours show field: the latest BMW Art Car No. 20 by Julie Mehretu was paired with the BMW Art Car No. 4 by Andy Warhol. The two were perched nose to nose at the center point of the row of cars placed right at the edge of the Great Pacific.

As a series, these cars have played a significant goal in helping the art world, the automotive world, and the general public accept cars as art—in and of themselves. Although design and style played an important role in the creation and selling of cars from the start, there was great resistant, particularly in the art world, to considering cars as fine art. There was even resistance to the thought that they could be worthy subjects of fine art.  

Confronting that resistance was not the initial goal of the BMW Art Car. The first Art Car simply came into being because a French race driver who loved art wanted to combine his passions. Before he took on the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a BMW 3.0 CSL race car, Hervé Poulain approached the automaker with a radical idea: he wanted to ask artist Alexander Calder to design the livery for his car. BMW agreed to the request, as did Calder, and so the very first BMW Art Car came into being in 1975.

That car met with such positive public acclaim that four more BMW Art Cars followed within the decade—from Frank Stella in 1976, Roy Lichtenstein in 1977, Andy Warhol in 1979, and Ernst Fuchs in 1982—and there was no disputing the fact that each was a legitimate piece of art. To put this in perspective, the Automotive Fine Arts Society was founded in 1983 “to promote the credibility of the automobile as a legitimate subject for fine art.”

BMW Art Cars continue to help people see cars in a new way today. Each artist brings their own artistic vision to a car, pushing the envelope of what cars are and can be.

BMW Art Cars No. 20 & No. 4