BMW Art Car

The BMW Art Car was a proposed collaboration between BMW and Andy Warhol that turned the act of painting a car into a sequence of practical experiments, public spectacle, and redesign. In the diary, the project is not a single completed image but a shifting commission: Warhol first sought a way to apply repeating flowers, struggled with paint that would not adhere to a model under television cameras, and then recorded a finished black car patterned with pink flowers. BMW subsequently set aside that design for a new model and invited him to paint another car in Paris.

Commission and Search for a Method

On March 23, 1978, Warhol noted that BMW wanted him to paint the outside of a car, adding that Stella and Roy Lichtenstein had already done similar work. The brief was clear in its scale—the car’s exterior—but the method and design were still unsettled. The entry presents the commission as an open problem rather than a fully formed plan.

By April 8, Warhol was still trying to work out how to paint the BMW. David Whitney suggested a roller of the kind used to apply flower designs to walls. Warhol went to paint stores and found a place that could obtain one by Monday; he planned to send Ronnie Cutrone to collect it. The diary even records the cab fares incurred in pursuing the tool: $2.00, $2.15, and $1.60. These small costs mark the practical labor behind the proposed image. Before the car could become a painted artwork, the right implement had to be found and brought to the studio.

The Model and the Failed Demonstration

On April 12, television cameras arrived unexpectedly to film Warhol painting a model of the BMW he was due to paint later. He intended to use the flower roller, initially planning a pink-and-black design. Chris Makos persuaded him to change the colors to yellow and black. But the demonstration went badly: the paint was shiny, slipped across the surface, and would not stick to the model. The roller did not produce the controlled pattern the plan required.

The failed application became a public scene. Warhol rolled paint onto Victor Bockris, while Leo Castelli arrived and nearly became sick at the mess. The cameras had come to record an artist at work, but the material itself disrupted the demonstration. Paint that slipped instead of adhering made the model conspicuous as an awkward, resistant surface—not a neutral support for a ready-made design. The diary’s account preserves the gap between the clean premise of a flower-patterned car and the untidy business of making that pattern hold.

A Finished Car, and a Changed Palette

On April 18, Warhol reported that he had finally painted a BMW: it was black, with pink flowers applied using the roller. This recorded result differed from both the original pink-and-black plan and the yellow-and-black combination proposed for the televised model. The entries do not explain how or when the colors shifted back, so the contrast remains visible without a stated resolution. What is clear is that the work reached a finished form after the earlier demonstration had failed.

Warhol wondered whether people would read meaning into the painted flowers, and hoped they would. His comment leaves the design open to interpretation rather than assigning it a definite message. The flowers are at once a repeating pattern produced with a practical decorating tool and a feature Warhol expected viewers might treat as meaningful. In the diary, the project’s visual identity emerges through these material decisions and reversals, not through an explanation of what the image was supposed to symbolize.

Redesign for a New BMW

At a later gathering, Leo Castelli told Warhol that BMW was bringing out a new car and would not use the design he had made because it belonged to the old model. The company nevertheless wanted him to go to Paris on June 12 to paint the new one. The information changed the status of the first painted car: it had been completed, but its design would not be carried over to the new vehicle. The diary does not report what happened to that first car or establish whether the Paris project was completed.

This turn makes the commission’s dependence on the automobile itself especially clear. The work was not simply a finished painting that could be transferred unchanged; BMW’s new model altered the design’s usefulness and required another undertaking. Across the entries, the BMW Art Car is shaped by several forces at once: the company’s request, Warhol’s search for a repeat-pattern tool, the paint’s behavior on a model, the interruption of television coverage, and the manufacturer’s change of car. Its development is recorded as an unfinished negotiation between an artistic design and the specific object it was meant to cover.