Exhibition: Warhol and Cars – American Icons

Andy Warhol was fascinated by the car as a product of American consumer culture. For the first time, an exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh focuses on his automotive work from 1946 to 1986.

With his art, Warhol decisively interpreted American pop culture. His subjects have ranged from typical American everyday objects such as Campbell’s soup tins and Coca-Cola bottles, up to the big Hollywood stars including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. But he was also devoted to the automobile as a symbol of progress and a central element of American consciousness, and he produced numerous drawings, prints, paintings and photographs on the subject. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is now showing 40-plus works with automotive themes. They range from coloured drawings of street cruisers from the 1950s, to the neon pop explosion of the 1980s – and even the BMW M1, the car that Warhol painted by hand in 1979, borrowed from the curators of the BMW Museum in Munich.