Rétromobile Stops at CART Department on the Way to Javits Javits

Rétromobile, the annual Parisian classic car and collecting event, gave New York an early taste of the show it will bring to the Javits Center November 19–22 in a preview via collector Larry Warsh’s CART Department, within the collection’s West Village gallery space devoted to artist-altered automobiles and the intersection of cars, art, design, and culture. Two of the remarkable vehicles slated for exibition were on display for a breakfast crowd of tastemakers and those in the know. For 50 years, Rétromobile has been a fixture on the European collector’s calendar, bringing rare automobiles, specialists, restorers, and serious enthusiasts to Paris each winter. The show has grown dramatically alongside the market it helped cultivate. Its anniversary edition at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles drew 181,500 visitors, with some 600 exhibitors and more than 2,000 collector vehicles on view.

Upon entering CART Department’s Morton Street space, guests immediately encountered a Mini Cooper that Damien Hirst adorned with polka dots in 2000, which has since appeared in editorial shoots. Further in was a 1937 Packard four-door sedan painted by Shepard Fairey that was featured in his recent show, “Filthy Lucre Ain’t Nothing,” which took place at CART Department September 24–27. (If Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow could see the Packard today, they would probably want to steal it.) The motifs and quotes that Fairey decorated it with—Wu-Tang Clan, Sex Pistols, and Joe Strummer, combined with contrasting images and text celebrating the glories of abundance on display—are philosophically straight out of Robin Hood. Offer Bonnie and Clyde a crash course in the past 90 years of pop culture, and they would swiftly move from “we want to steal this car” to “we must steal this car.”

Warsh lends the imprimatur of a man with prescient insight into the art market. He was an early collector of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring in the 1980s before turning his attention to a more mobile canvas in a redirection of the same collecting impulse that came from a desire to capture the energy that he felt in the old downtown scene. He began assertively focusing on the art-and-car initiative in 2013 before opening the West Village space in 2024. With CART Department, whose purpose is to treat the automobile as a serious cultural and artistic medium, Warsh has assembled more than 70 one-of-a-kind art cars by the likes of Jenny Holzer, Rashid Johnson, Jay-Z, Daniel Arsham, Zaha Hadid, Jeff Koons, and Barbara Kruger.

At the Javits Center, CART Department will draw from Warsh’s holdings with works including a Haring-painted 1971 Series III Land Rover, Ai Weiwei’s BMW covered with thousands of LEGO bricks, Fairey’s Packard 115C Touring Sedan, and the radically altered Maybach 57 seen in Jay-Z’s “Otis” video.