What You Need to Know About Every BMW Art Car

BMW's art cars have varied over the years — from the clearly amazing, to the downright bizarre, to the pop culture phenomenon — and now there's a book out that traces the design history and backstory of each one. Of course, we're firm believers in CliffsNotes, so we put together a list of everything you need to know about every art car that's been produced to date.

Year: 1975
Car:3.0CSL
Artist:Sandy Calder
Why it's cool:  The 3.0CSL is known to Bimmeristas as "The Batmobile" due to its wild styling. Sandy Calder was known not only for inventing the freaking mobile that hung above your crib as an infant, but also for painting jumbo jets for Braniff.  The combination of the two was pretty wild, and hard to top.

Year: 1976
Car:3.0CSL
Artist:Frank Stella
Why it's cool: Frank Stella was actually influenced by Jackson Pollock from an early age, and meant for this car to be a representation of the art of engineering. In Stella's own words: "It’s from a drawing on graph paper. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it’s morphed over the car’s forms it becomes interesting, and adapting the drawing to the racing car’s forms is interesting. Theoretically it’s like painting on a shaped canvas."

Year: 1977
Car:320i
Artist:Roy Lichtenstein
Why it's cool: Lichtenstein was brave enough of an artist to apply his unique style to works by greats like Van Gogh, but once he started working on an art car, it moved him, and influenced the design greatly: "The painted lines symbolize the road the car has to follow and the artwork also portrays the surroundings through which the car is being driven."

Year: 1979
Car:M1
Artist:Andy Warhol
Why it's cool:  How many BMWs do you know of that were originally designed to be a Lamborghini and painted by a legend like Warhol? He intentionally made the paintwork a bit sloppy to convey a sense of speed. It evidently worked, since the car finished second in its class at Le Mans that year. We're just surprised he didn't paint it full of coke cans and dollar symbols.

Year: 1982
Car:635 CSi
Artist:Ernst Fuchs
Why it's cool: The 635 CSi was a great car in its day, and BMW decided to use a production car as an art car for the first time. Fuchs started the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, which was basically all about going crazy in a controlled fashion. For example, this is how Fuchs described the car he painted: "A rabbit can be seen running across the motorway at night and leaping over a burning car – a primal fear and a daring dream of defeating the dimensions within which we live. It tells me which colours to choose. I read its lines, its shape and I can hear its call to speed. I see this beautiful rabbit jump through the flames of love – defeating fear itself…" Fantastic, huh?

Year: 1986
Car:635 CSi
Artist:Robert Rauschenberg
Why it's cool: The art that Robert Rauschenberg produced during his lifetime was all over the place, and this car was no different. The wheels are inspired by old dinner plates. Yes, there's a naked woman on the door, similar to this one. There's also a photo of swampland on the other side. That's probably not even a perverse metaphor, despite what Jeremy Glass would have you believe, since this car was intended to be a rolling museum of sorts.

Year: 1989
Car:M3
Artist:Michael Nelson Jagamara
Why it's cool:  While the wide-bodied, lightweight, race-inspired factory E30 M3's place in motoring history is secure, most people beyond the art world don't know the story of Australian Aboriginal artist Michael Nelson Jagamara. The son of a medicine man, he drove cattle for a living before pursuing a European education. He became a government official tasked with preserving a super rare sand art form in a crazy remote spot of northern Australia: the style in which this car is based, because culture.

Year: 1989
Car:M3
Artist:Ken Done
Why it's cool: Ken Done is one of Australia's leading pop artists. In the period between completing a bunch of works for the Sydney Olympics, and when he won Australian Father of the Year Honors (really), he started a line of interior design pieces based on impressionistic views of Australia's beachy landscapes, which are represented here. Insert obligatory 1980s Crocodile Dundee joke here.

Year: 1990
Car:535i
Artist:Matazo Kayama
Why it's cool: Kayama generally worked within traditional Japanese techniques, and got so involved in the process of using foil to paint the car, that he didn't even realize what the car itself looked like until he was finished.

Year: 1990
Car:730i
Artist:Cesare Manrique
Why it's cool: Manrique was an environmentalist artist noted for his installations like modern windmills that promoted aesthetically pleasing ways to be green. As such, he painted this 7-Series to "give the impression of being able to glide through the air without any resistance."

Year: 1991
Car:Z1
Artist:A.R. Penck
Why it's cool: Penck was from the neo-primitive school, which means his work generally looked like cave paintings and Easter Island statues. It's sort of fitting then that he painted on a Z1, BMW's awesome, oft-forgotten 3-series derivative in which the doors dropped down into the sills. Obviously, cavemen didn't have a phrase for "cooler than Lambo doors," but Penck did his best to draw it anyway.

Year: 1991
Car:525i
Artist:Esther Mahlangu
Why it's cool: Mahlangu was a proponent of traditional South African art at a time when it was politically dangerous for her to do so. Her use of tribal geometric shapes in endless repetition somehow conveys a sense of motion on the 5er, and it was such a popular success she wound up painting a British Airways jet in the same motif.

Year: 1992
Car:M3 GTR
Artist:Sandro Chia
Why it's cool: Amazingly not named after furry little plants shaped like animals, Chia's art is all about expressing emotion, even if you're not really sure what you're looking at. In this case, you're looking at the full-on race version of the already pretty great M3, so Chia painted a bunch of faces to represent all the stares you'd get if you drove one on the street.

Year: 1995
Car:850 CSi
Artist:David Hockney
Why it's cool: The 850CSi has the same basic V12 engine that powered cars like the McLaren F1, and David Hockney's a legend of the British art world who spent two decades refusing knighthood offers from the queen. He wanted to show that what's inside the CSi isn't David Caruso, so you can see bits of the engine under the hood, a dog in the back, a person driving on the door, and tire tread at all four corners.

Year: 1999
Car:V12 LMR
Artist:Jenny Holzer
Why it's cool: It's a friggin' race car decorated by the generally-critical-of-society feminist daughter of a car dealer who's clearly not conflicted at all. To both avoid slowing the car down and let people see it at night, it's covered in a highly reflective foil with the phrases "protect me from what I want," "you are so complex, you don't respond to danger," and "the unattainable is invariably attractive."

Year: 2007
Car:H2R
Artist:Olafur Eliasson
Why it's cool:  The H2R was BMW's experiment in hydrogen-powered engines. It set a host of records as the fastest hydrogen car on earth, so naturally, as soon as they gave it to the Danish artist known for using the elements in his work, he removed the car's body, covered it in a steel mesh, then spent a few days covering it in 500 gallons of ice. Somehow, it has never been used as the world's largest cocktail shaker.

Year: 2009*
Car:Z4
Artist:Robin Rhode
Why it's cool: BMW gave the car to an artist who a) loves Wu Tang, and b) was previously known for an art installation wherein he pretended he was a car thief. Naturally, he coated the wheels in paint and proceeded to do more donuts than a beat cop.

Year: 2010
Car:M3 GT2
Artist:Jeff Koons
Why it's cool: Koons has done everything from a Lady Gaga cover to this amazing yacht, and he's set all sorts of records for the value of art by a living artist. Still, he practically begged BMW for seven years before he got to do his own art car, so when they finally gave him one that would be competing at LeMans, he made it all about motion, in homage to Warhol's M1.

*The Robin Rhode Z4 is controversial, and some don't consider it one of BMW's art cars because the car itself wasn't painted. It's included here because it illustrates the use of a BMW in the making of an installation.

Aaron Miller is the Rides editor for Supercompressor. His old 325i would only be considered an art car by the visually impaired, though he does wash it at least once a year. If you follow him on Twitter, he'll keep you updated when he washes it next.