Snow Day moment of Zen

They say Old Man Winter is bearing down on us.  What better way to cope than pure escapism? The Automobiliac is glad to oblige.  Spring's not so far off, is it?

Automobiliac Archive: Speed, Style and Beauty Exhibition

Back in 2005, Ralph Lauren displayed his truly world class car collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition was entitled "Speed, Style, and Beauty." The show was well worth the trip to go and see it. Here from deep within my hard drive are photos I took at that show. Some are a tad blurry because the light was low and I did not have a tripod. Click on the pic below to see the rest. If you want to see truly phenominal photos of these cars, I'd recommend you pick up the official book of the exhibition shot by celebrated photographer Michael Furman.

Andy Warhol's BMW M1 Art Car in detail

Some of you may be familiar with the series of "Art Cars" that BMW has commissioned from internationally renowned artists over the years since the first Art Car by Alexander Calder ran at Le Mans in 1975.  Today we will look at the BMW M1 that was painted in 1979 by Andy Warhol, and which did indeed race at Le Mans as well.  Recently BMW was good enough to put this car on display in Grand Central Station in New York along with 4 other cars.  Having seen the car in photographs many times, I was eager to inspect it up close.  What I saw was thoroughly surprising to me.  In most photos it appears to have a matte finish, but in reality there is a glossy coating on the surface that almost gives the impression the paint is still wet.  The build up of paint is quite thick (one can only imagine the aerodynamic penalty this caused on the Mulsanne Straight at over 200mph.)  Warhol applied fields of various acrid colors of paint directly to the car himself with a wide brush --artists before him in the series had painted scale models from which the designs were transfered to the actual vehicle-- and then smeared the paint with his gloved fingertips.  Even the signature on the rear bumper was actually smeared into the paint by hand. 

In warhol's words:  "I tried to portray speed pictorially. If a car is moving really quickly, all the lines and colors are blurred."

Knowing that Warhol's aphorisms were often meant to mess with the mind of the listener more than actually illuminate his work, I don't really care what he said.  What really fascinates me about this piece, as someone who studied Art History, is what a real anomaly it is within Warhol's work.  Generally his work was created in a serial manner, by other people in his "factory," using techniques such as silk screening to remove or efface the hand of the artist.  In this manner, Pop was a rejection of the "action painting" of the Abstract Expressionists such as Willem DeKooning and Jackson Pollock, which was about working quickly in the moment and focused heavily on the artist as creator.  Yet what Warhol's Art Car represents is essentially an "action painting" on a 3-dimensional canvas.  he is said to have painted the car in 23 minutes, and there is footage to be enjoyed of him doing the work. (see it here)

I am not going to go so far as to make any stabs at guessing what he was really thinking when he painted the car, but I think the piece gets ignored by academic Art Historians of Warhol because it is viewed as a novelty item rather than serious Art.  And perhaps it is.  But the fact remains that in creating this piece Warhol diverged radically from his typical approach to artmaking...And I just happen to think that is cool.

See the rest of my photos of the car here.

Why do we love Patina?

What is it about Patina on a car that makes so many collectors go gaga while others wrinkle their noses?  Lately the survivor or preservation class has become a popular category at car shows, where unrestored cars are celebrated and admired for what they have become over time.  Some fellows lose themselves in the wabi sabi of pitted chrome, ripped upholstery, and stonechips from roads long since traveled while others decry the category as nothing more than fetishizing neglect.   "Patina?" one Bugatti owner once sneered at me, "Patina is something they sell you at Pottery Barn."

Is a top notch restoration a case of preserving history or destroying it?  Car lovers are not alone in pondering this topic.  After all, look what happened when they cleaned Michelangelo's  Sistine Chapel ceiling! It brought people to question whether the things to which we assign cultural value have more meaning as they were originally intended to be, or how they have come to be over time.  But who can even say with certainty how something was really intended to be when the creator of that artifact is no longer with us? When it comes to really significant cars, and those reasonably well preserved, most would agree that "leaving it alone" is better than a full restoration.  Yet what if we took this attitude for all barn finds?  So few coachbuilt cars survived the second world war intact that we would never get to experience the thrill of seeing a gleaming, streamlined Talbot Lago or Delahaye roll across the lawn at Pebble Beach as if it had just come from Henri Chapron''s atelier.  These cars were meant to be seen in all their glory, some say.  So why not let them shine, and in so doing celebrate the brilliance of the design and craft that went into them?  Why not relive the glamour of the age in which they were made?  The Mercedes Gullwing pictured in this article was auctioned off a few years back at Greenwich, CT.  As I was snapping these photos, I heard many diverse reactions to the car's condition and just as many high appraisals of its value --despite the fact it had not moved under its own power in around 35 years-- as laughter at the silly sap who would buy this old heap when he could have a restored one for just a little more.  I am personally conflicted about this myself, as a lover of both the history as well as the beauty of the automotive form.  I love the look of these worn cars sometimes, but can't help but loathe the person who let them get that way.  Oh well, I just wish I could have a decent re-spray on my Alfa...

See more pictures of the barn find 300SL here.

Bugattis in the Rain

Since it's winter, I thought I would go back in time to a wet and wonderful weekend when I saw the American Bugatti Club members race their wonderful cars on the rain-soaked Watkins Glen course.  The rain was so heavy that day that most of the vintage racers stayed off the track.  But not the ABC members, who braved it out on their skinny tires to the delight of the few spectators who bothered to show up!  I took these photos at the long sweeping turn 6.