Announcing a new weekly series: The Elf scans

'Tis the season where one naturally thinks of elves, but I recently acquired a fantastic set of A4 sized photo cards that were printed as promotional items for french petroleum giant ELF.  These cards, each celebrating the cars and drivers of the Matra and Alpine teams, were available at Elf fuel stations in France circa 1970. Starting in January 2011, I will upload a high res image of a new card each week.  The photos are simply sensational, and there are many cool cutaway drawings and diagrams on the backs of the cards.  See below for my Saul Bass-inspired mosaic showing the whole series!

Sacre Bleu! Matra V-12 Prototype Cutaways and Video

I really love these cutaway illustrations by Robert Roux, showing the inner workings of the Matra Prototype race cars.  The Matra V-12 has one of the most spine-tingling, ear-shattering mechanical banshee screams I have ever heard. It was not terribly successful in an F1 chassis, but in the Matra sports prototypes, it propelled the French aerospace company, formerly occupied with advanced missile systems, to 3 time outright victory at La Sarthe in 1972-74.

The good part starts around 0:35 when they fire it up! The exquisite part starts around 1:18 when the dumb piano music fades out and they really uncork it!!

Automobiliac Video of the Week: Le Mans - Just the racing scenes

This week's delectable time killer is a really well done compilation of all the race scenes from Steve McQueen's immortal movie Le Mans.  I assume most of you have seen the film, so I will spare you the plot summary.  Just watch and enjoy the sounds! God I wish I had been alive to see these cars in their heyday.

Jeff Koons BMW Art Car unveiled at last in Paris

After months of anticipation, BMW and Jeff Koons finally unveiled the latest in the Art Car series in Paris, in the same venue where Roy Lichtenstein unveiled his Art Car many years ago. I haven't even read any reactions about this new car on the internet yet, but here's mine:  I like it!  Maybe it isn't so intellectually esoteric as Jenny Holzer's race car or Olafur Eliasson's inexplicable ice sculpture.  But as far as continuing the tradition started by Calder, Lichtenstein, Stella, and Warhol, Koons has clearly picked up where they left off.  And he has done so in a way that is up to date and, frankly rather fetching to look at.  I think the car is going to look really amazing as it blows past the spectators (and the competition?) on the Mulsanne Straight.  Though viewers may not have to scratch their heads and ponder what it means, they'll find the chopped streaks of color exciting and dynamic, and I just think that's great.  At night, the black car will recede and the colored stripes will leap out at the viewer like a neon comet!  In this day of excessive sponsorship and car liveries that lack imagination or beauty, it is so refreshing to see a racing car that was painted with goal of expressing speed and being visually exciting.  If that was his sole goal, Koons has acheived it well. I can't wait to see night photos of the car.  I hope they put some irridescence in the printed colors so that it will reflect camera flashes.

If you want to read my prior article analyzing Andy Warhol's BMW M1 Art Car, click HERE.

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.