Unexpected reunion
10/11/2018
It was probably in the seventies when I discovered a poster in an art store that immediately appealed to me. It was a print of an oil painting by Erró, an Icelandic painter. According to Wikipedia, his painting style is now classified somewhere between surrealism and pop art. But at the time I wasn't particularly interested in this, I was simply drawn to the picture and its content, as it showed a kind of car scrapyard, except that the wildly arranged cars were not destroyed, but complete. It mainly showed vehicles from the late 1960s, including prototypes, cutaway models and technical components. You could look at the picture for hours and still discover another detail that you had previously missed. The poster was given a place of honor in my room and hung there for several years. It probably disappeared during a move.
Yesterday I came across the picture again, this time the original, which looks even more impressive in its oversize. It is currently hanging in the BMW Museum. As part of the private collection of Hervé Poulain, it is on display there together with other pictures by the initiator of the "BMW Art Cars", to which a special exhibition was dedicated, which celebrated its opening this week. Among other things, the first four Art Cars designed by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Alexander Calder and Roy Lichtenstein are on display. And yesterday, Frenchman Hervé Poulain, who made the Art Cars possible with his initiative and also raced them at Le Mans, was also on site.
A portrait of him from that time also hangs in the BMW Museum, showing him together with the 1975 CSL Coupé designed by Calder. And he told me enthusiastically that he also loved Erró's painting and that it had once been shown side by side with a Roy Lichtenstein at the Pompidou Center. He also told me that the painter Erró, whose real name was Guðmundur Guðmundsson and who was born in 1932, used to visit the motor shows to make sketches (and perhaps also photos). If you look closely, you will find many of today's classics from the late sixties, such as the Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona, the Simca 1200 S Coupé, the Alfa Romeo Carabo (by Gandini for Bertone) or a Mercedes /8.
Of course, Hervé Poulain also told me a lot about the Art Cars, but we will be publishing an article about this and the Munich special show soon.
