Braking News · Fine Art
27 Automotive Fine Artists to Show New Work at Pebble Beach
Every August, the Monterey Peninsula becomes the center of the automotive universe — and not just for the machinery. Steps from the show field where the world’s most beautiful cars compete, the world’s leading automotive fine artists traditionally unveil their newest paintings and sculpture. The year we first reported this story, twenty-seven of them brought new work. The number changes; the spectacle doesn’t.
The Concours Art Tradition
The pairing makes perfect sense. A concours d’elegance is itself an argument that automobiles are art; the painters and sculptors simply make the argument in a second medium. The Automotive Fine Arts Society — the juried society founded in 1983 that gathers the discipline’s most accomplished members — has anchored the fine art presence at the famous Pebble Beach gathering for decades, with member exhibitions that collectors plan entire trips around.
What makes these exhibitions special is the debut factor. Artists hold back their best new canvases all year for the August reveal, the way couturiers hold work for fashion week. Standing in the tent on Sunday morning, you are seeing paintings that did not exist publicly the day before — often with the very automobile that inspired them parked a hundred yards away, wearing fresh wax.
What “New Work” Looks Like
The range is broader than outsiders expect. Oils of pre-war coachbuilt classics, yes — but also watercolor studies of pit lane chaos, bronze and wood sculpture that abstracts a fender line into pure motion, pencil portraits of drivers, and mixed-media pieces playing with period advertising. Styles run from museum-grade photorealism to loose impressionism that captures how a race feels rather than how it looked. (Our guide to the art collection walks through these styles in detail.)
Visiting an Exhibition Well
- Go early. The art tents are calmest in the first hour, when the light is best and the artists are freshest.
- Talk to the artists. Most attend in person and love discussing technique, reference research and the cars themselves. There is no better free education in automotive art.
- Ask about studies. Preliminary sketches and small studies for major canvases are often available at a fraction of the finished work’s price — and carry all of its DNA.
- Take the long view. If a new debut stops you cold, remember that today’s exhibition piece is tomorrow’s sought-after secondary-market work.
The Wider Monterey Art Week
The juried society exhibition is the anchor, but hardly the whole scene. During car week the peninsula fills with satellite gallery shows, automotive photography exhibitions, sculpture installations at the auction venues, and artists sketching live along the tour route — easel on the roadside, pre-war machinery rolling past at touring speed. Even the auction catalogs become art objects that week, commissioning original photography and essays for headline lots. For a collector, the education compounds: in a single weekend you can see the finest automotive art being made today and the automobiles that justify it, each sharpening your eye for the other.
If You Can’t Make It to the Coast
The good news: this world is more accessible than its setting suggests. Artists publish their new collections online after the weekend, galleries carry editioned prints of exhibition pieces, and a thoughtful collector can build around concours-debuted work from anywhere. Considering a piece of your own machine instead? That’s what commissioning is for.