Andy Warhol: Cars

Andy Warhol was commissioned, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the motor car, a series of 80 works intended to record the history of the motor car from the Daimler Motor Coach and Benz Patent Motor Car, both dating from 1886 to the present day. Warhol’s unfinished 1986/87 Cars series was the last one to be undertaken in his lifetime; only 36 silk-screen paintings and 13 drawings representing eight different Mercedes-Benz models were completed. Much like his previous work involving the iconography of branded consumer products and celebrities, Warhol managed to bring together the image of the automobile, specifically the Mercedes-Benz brand, within the context of high art.
In this exhibition, for the first time in three decades at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, Warhol’s Cars are paired with the actual cars that inspired them. The vehicles in the show are described as “some of the most iconic and valuable cars in the world” and include the 1937 W 125 and the 1970 C 111 II (both also on loan from the Benz Museum). Falling just outside Warhol’s specific “iconography of the everyday,” these vintage automobiles, like many exclusive luxury products, are desired by many but scarcely available to the masses. Thus, as objects of general longing and icons of automotive history, the abstracted images associated with these consumer products occupy a prominent space within cultural memory.