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This is a simple video edit I've compiled from two different BMW videos. I truly love the BMW M1 Art Car to the point of adoration. Not just the car but the romance of how the artwork was completed. I hope you enjoy this edit, I had fun throwing it together.

I'm not sure how to get the video to display in this post (if a Mod could help that'd be great).

My Instagram: milk4coffee







Here is some background history on the car/project if you don't know about it already.


Sometimes the only way to high art is through deep pockets.

Perhaps this occurred to Andy Warhol when BMW asked him to paint its M1 Group 4 race car in 1977. Warhol, already a superstar, was constantly fascinated with the melding of the commercial and the artistic....

...Out of all of its Art Cars, this M1 -- already nearly priceless as an automobile, let alone one breathed upon by the most. ...


... Warhol, painting it by hand and by himself, stood in stark contrast to his work at the Factory. … Warhol observed that 'I adore the car, it's much better than a work of art.'...

Prior artists had painted a scale model of the car, then had their artwork laboriously transferred to the full-size model. But Warhol insisted on painting the car himself, dipping his fingers into the paint, daubing it on with a foam brush, smelling its intoxicating fumes, feeling the bodywork with his own hands. His signature is on the car, signed with his finger right by the exhaust.


Warhol needed just 24 minutes to paint the car, in a shop outside of Munich. By the time the television crews had rolled in, he was finished. "Should I paint another car?" he asked, pointing at a brand-new BMW, one that was belonged to the man who owned the paint shop.

"Over my dead body," the owner replied.

"He hates me when I tell that story," said Girst, "because he's still very embarrassed about that -- that he didn't let Andy Warhol paint his car, and turn it into an artwork."

Warhol's paint gleams in the spotlights, its hues contrasting sharply like a cartographer's first draft; streaks of different hues the width of a finger scatter across the solid patches like creased and crumpled paper. "I tried to portray a sense of speed," said Warhol. "When a car is going really fast all the lines and colors become a blur."

Warhol painted some additional body panels in those 24 minutes -- spare bumpers and side moldings, not as souvenirs but for a very specific purpose. Two years later, in 1979, the car entered the 24 Hours of Le Mans with Manfred Winkelhock, Marcel Mignot and Hervé Poulain driving.

...

Warhol's M1 was more successful. With Poulain, Winkelhock and Mignot behind the wheel, the car successfully completed 288 laps at Sarthe -- coming in 6th overall, and 2nd in its class. During the course of the race it made contact numerous times, which is when Warhol's spare bumpers came in handy. (Primered bodywork on the M1 itself would be as a mole on the Mona Lisa.) Next to Roy Lichenstein's Group 5 320i. It finished first in its class, also driven by Poulain -- this was the most successful Art Car to date.

There was something special about the first four Art Cars: They were based exclusively on race cars raced at the grueling endurance level, and always after they were painted. Priceless works on parade in the quickest way possible, they captured the public's imagination before the public would bicker loudly about what truly constituted art. They fueled a discussion kicked off by Girst's beloved Duchamp.

...

The car still runs, its mighty 470-hp M88 inline-six intact, but there are ignition problems and the car hasn't been fired up since that 2009 outing. Not to say that it's not busy: Inquiries for Art Cars come worldwide. It is shipped from museum to museum depending on which curator organizes an artist's retrospective -- no dealership displays here, Girst stressed.

Maybe that ignition remains broken for a reason. "Can you imagine someone driving off with it?" Girst smiled. "It would be the greatest art heist of the century."

By Blake Z. Rong



Read more: http://autoweek.com/article/car-life/close-andy-warhols-bmw-m1-art-car#ixzz4rRGuVvQc