And it wasn’t a BMW;
Hervé Poulain came up with the idea of having a racing car designed by an artist in 1975 – but the first Art Car in automotive history was designed by the Ukrainian-French painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk as early as 1924: She painted an open Unic Tourer with abstract geometric elements, turning it into a rolling car sculpture.
Sonia Delaunay-Terk was born Sarah Ilinitchna Stern in 1885, adopted by her uncle in St. Petersburg, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and the Académie de la Palette art school in Paris, where she married Robert Delaunay in 1910 and developed simultaneism with squares and triangles with geometric abstraction. In 1964, she was the first living woman to have a solo retrospective dedicated to her at the Louvre in Paris, and shortly before her death, she became a member of the Legion of Honour in 1979.
The French Unic Type L2 with a 2.6-liter four-cylinder 9 HP, painted in 1924 in cubist style, was an open-top tourer in the brand’s taxi tradition and produced 18 hp – with a bore of 87 mm and a stroke of 110 mm. Today it stands next to a contemporary dress in the Spanish Museo del Automóvil y la Moda de Málaga (see KÜSMagazin No. 86, 01/2026).