Richard Pettibone is considered a vanguard of the Appropriation movement, a group of American artists in the 1980s such as Sherrie Levine and Jeff Koons who borrowed from ready-materials or even existing artworks. Their influence stemmed from Walter Benjamin's famous essay 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1934) which argued that original artworks have an 'aura' diminished by reproductions or copies. Artists like Levine and Pettibone instead sought to make the familiar strange and to create new encounters and meanings for commonplace images or objects.

Pettibone famously made small models of other artists already well-known for their appropriative works, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, particularly choosing artists already interested in reproduction and seriality. The present work is an early painting from 1963 which hints at appropriation in terms of the painted Bugatti car and sign, and with added action painting.

Born in 1938 in Los Angeles, CA, Pettibone received his MFA from the Otis Art Institute in 1962, only a year before the present example. Important exhibitions of Pettibone’s work including three retrospectives in 2006 at the Laguna Art Museum, the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Spring, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

Pettibone's combination of Appropriation and Pop art sensibilities has won him critical notice and engendered his many presitigious museum exhibitions and retrospectives. He continues to live and work in New York. His work is included in collections of Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.