These BMW Art Cars Were Designed By Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons & Frank Stella

Modern art masters turned classic BMWs into rolling works of art.

For the love of art—and to publicly elevate the status of its automobiles—BMW has tapped leading contemporary artists to beautify its vehicles with stylized designs that stretch from bumper to bumper. Since 1975, the so-called BMW Art Car collection has grown to include 20 distinct commissions, five of which will be displayed at the U.K.’s classic race vehicle-showcasing Goodwood Revival festival. in celebration of the collection’s 50th anniversary.

The decades-spanning exhibit begins with an original BMW 3.0 CSL, a homologation special that won multiple European Touring Car titles in the 1970s. For the second ever BMW Art Car, Minimalism pioneer Frank Stella employed his signature, stripped-down linear style to render a black and white design that was “inspired by the technical basis of the car itself,” per BMW.

The next year in 1977, Roy Lichtenstein transformed an aggressively equipped BMW 320i Turbo that had previously competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans into a rolling piece of pop art, featuring Lichtenstein’s oversized “Ben-Day” dots and a brightly colored palate. In 1982, masterful Realism technician Ernst Fuchs ’ fiery design of a BMW 635 Ci marked the first in the collection to be based on a production car. Fuchs’ treatment was so eye-catching, it became known as the “Fire Fox on a Hare Hunt.”

In 1995, David Hockney designed the 14th car in the collection, a BMW 850 CSi, aiming to reveal the car’s inner workings with incredibly detailed paintwork that includes the outline of a driver on the door (plus a pooch perched on the floor behind him) and a stylized suction vent.

Jeff Koons, whose $91 million metallic rabbit sculpture holds the auction record for the most expensive artwork sold by a living artist, brought a dynamic palette of vibrant, contrasting colors to his BMW M3 GT2 in 2010, employing Pop Art-channeling, movement-heavy elements to convey speed and energy, regardless of the vehicle’s velocity.

The unique collection of cars will be on display across the Goodwood Revival weekend in Earls Court from September 12-14.