Joseph Beuys drove his Bentley to Capri
and encountered the Mafia
The Bentley S1 was built by Bentley Motors Limited from 1955 to 1959 in Crewe, England. The Bentley S1 replaced the Bentley R-Type. The Bentley factory bodywork was identical to the bodywork of the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, it was made of steel apart from the doors, the hood, and the trunk lid which were made of aluminum. The only difference to the Rolls-Royce was the radiator design and emblem. The Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and the Bentley both used the six-cylinder engine familiar from the previous model. The engine was equipped with SU twin carburetors which were replaced by newer models from 1957.
A 4-speed automatic transmission was standard equipment, there was a 4-speed manual transmission as an option until 1957. The S1 was available with two wheelbases: 3124 mm and from 1957 with 3226 mm. From 1955 to 1959, 3072 vehicles with short wheelbases were built, 145 of which had special coachwork. Of the S1 with a long wheelbase, 35 were built, 12 of them with special coachwork.
The history of our Bentley S1 is extraordinary. The vehicle was completed in 1959 in Crewe, England, and was registered on March 20, 1959, by its first owner, the private banker of Oppenheim. In the middle of the 1960s, the vehicle was sold to the once famous Düsseldorf car dealership "Auto Becker". In 1966, a poor-looking man with a worn hat and raincoat entered the salesrooms of Auto Becker. This man was none other than Joseph Beuys.
Joseph Beuys was a German action artist, art theorist, and professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. He is regarded worldwide as one of the most important action artists of the 20th century. Helmut Becker, the son of the company founder Wilhelm Becker, always preached to his employees not to judge customers by their appearance. So, he took care of the visually not very promising customer. Supposedly Beuys introduced himself with the following sentence: "Hello, my name is Joseph Beuys, and I would like to buy a Cadillac or Rolls-Royce". With clever salesman rhetoric, he convinces Beuys of the qualities of a used Bentley S1, built in 1959, which the private banker von Oppenheim had previously driven.
Beuys then pulled out an envelope from his coat and immediately paid cash for the DM 25,000 car. Until his death in 1986, Beuys used the car daily to drive from his home to the Kunst Akademie Düsseldorf where he was teaching. After the S1 had been in his possession for 12 years, he had it restored by Karl Heinz Siegner in Berlin in 1978. During the restoration, the folding roof was also retrofitted.