Detail from Mercedes-Benz W 196 R Grand Prix Car (Streamlined version, 1954) by Andy Warhol. Images courtesy Christie’s.
As a Fangio-driven Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix racer has done for the cars at auction, so might a representation of a Fangio-driven Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix racer do for automotive art at auction? Then again, Juan Manuel Fangio might not have nearly as much to do with the $16 million that a silkscreened painting of a Mercedes-Benz W196 is expected to get at auction next month as the artist who created it: Andy Warhol.
Though Warhol never had a driver’s license, he claimed to love cars (he did own at least one car, a Rolls-Royce) and find them fascinating. The commercial artist-turned-pop artist began to incorporate American cars into his work in the early 1960s, famously painted a BMW M1 for the marque’s art cars series, and in later years produced the Death and Disaster series of paintings depicting car crashes. One of his last projects, one unfinished at the time of his death in 1987, also made extensive use of automobile imagery, permitting Warhol one final statement on how the automobile has become infused in the American consciousness.
The Cars series of silkscreened paintings grew out of a smaller series of four Mercedes-Benz-themed pieces that art dealer Hans Mayer commissioned Warhol to paint in the summer of 1986, inspired by Mercedes-Benz’s centennial. Mayer then took those paintings to Mercedes-Benz and convinced the automaker to commission Warhol to extend the series to cover milestone cars from throughout the company’s history. Mercedes-Benz supplied Warhol the photographs of its cars, and Warhol then turned the photographs into silkscreens that winter.
Mercedes-Benz reportedly commissioned 80 pieces focusing on 20 different cars, but when Warhol died following surgery in February 1987, he had completed just 36 silkscreened paintings (and 13 drawings) focused on eight of those cars, including the W196 Grand Prix racer made famous by Fangio and Stirling Moss. Similar under the skin to the W196 that famously set a world auction record when it sold for $29.65 million earlier this year, the version of the W196 that Warhol depicted used a streamlined body designed for high-speed tracks like Rheims and Monza, both of which Mercedes-Benz won in 1954.
Measuring more than 13 feet tall and 15 feet wide, Mercedes-Benz W 196 R Grand Prix Car (Streamlined version, 1954) depicts the famed W196 a dozen times, Marilyn Monroe-style. Christie’s, which will handle the auction for the silkscreened painting, noted that Warhol’s depiction of the W196 via repetition both exacerbates and deflates the car’s symbolism. “Pictured by Andy Warhol, (the Mercedes-Benz) becomes a symbol of post-war prosperity, industrial challenge, and America’s fascination with the packaged image of the sleek. Warhol indulges in the American fascination with objects, status, beauty, and fame, reveling in the lack of consciousness precipitated by obsessive material desire.”
Daimler-Benz, which currently keeps the silkscreened painting, along with the rest of Warhol’s Cars series and about 2,000 other modern and contemporary works, said that it is selling the piece to secure the collection’s long-term future. The Christie’s pre-auction estimate for Mercedes-Benz W 196 R Grand Prix Car (streamlined version, 1954) ranges from $12 million to $16 million.
The Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale will take place November 12 in the Christie’s salesroom in Rockefeller Center in New York City. For more information, visit Christies.com.
UPDATE (13.November 2013): The silkscreen sold for $13.045 million, including buyer’s premium.
