BMW ART CAR DISPLAYED IN FIRST COMPLETE

RETROSPECTIVE OF ROY LICHTENSTEIN SCULPTURE

Exhibition Presented at the Corcoran Gallery of Art

June 5 to September 30,1999

In 1977, Roy Lichtenstein turned a BMW 320i into a piece of his art which was driven at the prestigious Le Mans 24-hour race in France by Frenchmen Herve Poulain and Marcel Mignot, who finished 9th overall and first in class.

When Lichtenstein was drafting his Art Car, he spent a long time thinking about all the things that happens to a car. The result of this critical examination of the car is an amazing blend of aerodynamic qualities on the one hand and artistic skill on the other.

When Lichtenstein created the third BMW Art Car, he said he used "painted lines as a road, pointing the way for the car. The design also shows the scenery as it passes by. Even the sky and sunlight are to been seen .... you could list all the things a car experiences - the only difference is that this car mirrors all these things even before it takes to the road."

The car's design casts a picture of passing scenery in which both the car and it's movement are one single entity. And although Lichtenstein's comic art was already a thing of the past by then, his Art Car is clearly influenced by it: the long-drawn colored strips act as "speedlines" - a feature used in comics to suggest speed. Even the oversized dots used by Lichtenstein, the "Benday dots", are reminiscent of his famous comic-strip pictures.

The harmony achieved between predetermined aerodynamic features and free composition is pure Lichtenstein. It is an expression of his artistic credo: art must be an element of everyday life - its themes and inspiration must come from the lives of ordinary people.

Background on the BMW Art Car Program

Roy Lichtenstein was the third artist to join the BMW Art Car Collection. He was followed by Andy Warhol, 1979; Ernst Fuchs, 1982; Robert Rauschenberg, 1986; Ken Done, 1989; Michael Jagamara Nelson, 1989; Matazo Kayama, 1990; Cesar Manrique, 1990; A.R. Penck, 1991; Esther Mahlangu, 1991; Sandro Chia, 1992 and David Hockney, 1995. Alexander Calder created the first Art Car in 1975 followed by Frank Stella in 1976.

The concept of the BMW Art Car was conceived in 1975, the year that French auctioneer and race driver Herve Poulain first entered Le Mans. Searching for a link between art and motorsports, he asked his friend Alexander Calder, to commission a rolling canvas on the BMW 3.0 CSL he would race.

Background on the Exhibit

Though best known as a painter, American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein also devoted his artistic career to creating sculptural, three-dimensional objects. This compelling new exhibition includes 100 sculptures and three-dimensional maquettes or models, the earliest of which are figural carvings and assemblages dating from the mid-1940s and 1950s, and latest of which is his last personally finished sculpture: the monumental House 11, seen only at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

Various other large Lichtenstein sculpture projects are included in the Corcoran exhibition. These range from a 32-foot-high Brushstroke Group sculpture of 1988 to the 12 foot-high Brushstroke Nude (1993), a towering, colorfully painted cast aluminum sculpture. An additional 103 works on paper (collages, sketches and sketchbooks) are also presented, many of which have never been previously exhibited.