Is It Art?(The Talk of the Town)(artist Frank Stella and BMW's 'Stella')(Column)

The marriage of art and business has multiple offspring, but perhaps none are more enduring than BMW's art cars. In 1975, the German automaker persuaded Alexander Calder to design a paint job for one of its racing models, and then promptly enlisted Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol to do the same, eventually commissioning twelve other artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, A. R. Penck, David Hockney, and, most recently, Olafur Eliasson (2007). Exhibited widely here and abroad, the Big Four of the art cars--by Stella, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rauschenberg--arrive on March 24th at Grand Central Terminal, where, through April 6th, they will bear proud witness to everything that Detroit's Big Three have done wrong.

The artist whose life and work were most affected by the art-car gambit is Frank Stella, whose black-and-white, graph-paper-patterned BMW 3.0 CSL competed in the twenty-four-hour Le Mans race in 1976. Reminiscing about it last week, at his house in the Village, the artist, who retains his grunge look at the age of seventy-two, said that he did not go to Le Mans that year but wishes that he had. "BMW was trying to be more prominent at Le Mans, which at the time was dominated by Porsche," he said. "So they built a very powerful car"--Stella's--"and it shot out front at the start. Of course, after an hour or so it was no longer in front, but the news photos of the start went all over the world, and the black-and-white design reproduced great."

Stella went to a lot of Grand Prix and Formula Two races after that. "I knew Ronnie Peterson, the Swedish driver who drove my BMW at Le Mans," he said. "Harriet, my wife, and I saw him race in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1978. That was really sad, because he crashed at Monza, and died of his injuries. I made a series of prints called 'Polar Coordinates' about him, and gave some of them to the Royal Automobile Club of Sweden. Later, I did a huge series of paintings called 'Circuits,' which were named after race tracks I'd been to."

Stella's fee for the BMW paint job was a two-year lease on a new, non-racing BMW. "I'd never owned a car before," he said. "Harriet and I went down to Florida to pick it up, and within five minutes I destroyed the gearbox. BMW gave me several more cars after that, and I gave one to Harriet, and finally ...