100 Things You Should Know About Mercedes-Benz | #3

The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection currently consists of about 3,000 works created by around 700 artists. The great thing about the collection is that most of these works are not simply gathering dust in storage rooms. Instead, they are on show in the midst of the company’s daily operations — in front of buildings and inside foyers, conference rooms, and canteens. As a result, our colleagues can get to know a significant section of 20th-century art as well as contemporary works by international artists in passing.

The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection was born in 1977, when the Board of Management decided to buy a painting titled Ruhe und Bewegung II (Rest and Movement II) by the Stuttgart-based painter Willi Baumeister. In subsequent years the focus of the collection was initially on artists from southern Germany, including the Bauhaus representative Oskar Schlemmer and the Surrealist Jean Arp.

The collection has remained faithful to its focus on abstract, conceptual, and minimalist art down to the present day. The geographic scope of the collection, like that of Daimler itself, has long been extended far beyond southern Germany. Among the most recent acquisitions are works from South Africa, India, South America, and China.

Art lovers who do not regularly walk through the hallways of Mercedes-Benz buildings can also view parts of the collection. In the greater Stuttgart area, there are regular tours of the works on show in Sindelfingen and in the Stuttgart locations Möhringen and Pragsattel — and they are open to the public. In addition, the Mercedes-Benz Contemporary exhibition space in Haus Huth on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin was opened in 1999. On its approximately 600 square meters of floor space, there’s a new art exhibition approximately every three months. That’s one more reason why Berlin is always worth a visit from our colleagues from Swabia and elsewhere — and not only because there’s no admission charge.

The best-known item in the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection is probably a series of artworks that the company commissioned from the Pop Art icon Andy Warhol to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the automobile. The title of the series — “Cars” — closes the circle that connects artistic automobiles and automotive art. The only things that Warhol printed on the canvases were cars.

In this column we present interesting, odd, or generally unknown facts from the world of Mercedes-Benz. We publish a new story in the series of “100 things you should know about Daimler” regularly here on Mercedes-Benz Magazine.