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Watchmaking’s affairs of the art
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Watchmaking’s affairs of the art

Monday, 14 July 2014
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Christophe Roulet
Editor-in-chief, HH Journal

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5 min read

Irrespective of claims that watchmaking is an art akin to painting or sculpture, its embracing of artistic activity, almost independently of its primary function to record time, has sparked a dialogue with a world beyond the purely mechanical.

Friends of the arts and of culture in general will have had a busy diary these past three months, as watchmakers have concocted an unusually rich calendar of events. At the last Art Basel, Audemars Piguet announced the creation of an Art Commission (see Audemars Piguet’s invitation to contemporary art); an official partner to the Shanghai International Film Festival, Jaeger-LeCoultre staged an auction on the festival’s opening night to promote the development of the Chinese film industry; still in Shanghai, Girard-Perregaux celebrated its partnership with the future Academy Museum of Motion Pictures that will open in Los Angeles; as a Major Patron of the Louis XIV rooms at the Louvre, and of the completed restoration of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, Breguet celebrated the galleries’ long-awaited reopening with the world’s most-visited museum; Jaquet Droz, the Presenting Partner of the Béjart Ballet Lausanne, invited admirers to two performances at Versailles; in Paris, Vacheron Constantin hosted a gala dinner in honour of Brigitte Lefèvre, director of the Paris Opera Ballet – the manufacture has been a partner to the Paris National Opera since 2007 (see An ongoing dialogue with artistic currents).

These affinities, and others, prove that art and watchmaking move in similar circles. Indeed, certain partnerships and initiatives have become an established part of the cultural landscape, such as Chopard at the Cannes Film Festival, Jaeger-LeCoultre at the Venice Film Festival, or Rolex’s Mentor and Protégé initiative which “brings artistic masters from seven disciplines together with highly promising young artists.” Mentors have included musician Youssou N’Dour, filmmaker Martin Scorsese, writer Mario Vargas Llosa, choreographer Trisha Brown and architect Peter Zumthor. Special mention must also go to the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, which resides inside a building by Jean Nouvel, and, as a more recent venture, M.A.D Gallery, a space for kinetic art launched by MB&F in Geneva in 2011 and which, flushed with success, now boasts a sister venue in Taipei. As for Vacheron Constantin, in addition to its numerous commitments in support of music and ballet companies, it has for a number of years been a partner to the Journées Européennes des Métiers d’Art.

Swiss watchmaking survived thanks to this paradigm shift.
"Art applied to watchmaking"

These “artistic crafts” are precisely the disciplines that spring to mind when considering watchmaking’s flirtation with the Muses. For a number of years now, watchmakers have proved infinitely creative not only when reinstating age-old techniques such as plique-à-jour enamel, miniature painting and mystery gem-setting, but also in revealing techniques that were unknown to watchmaking, such as marquetry of straw or petrified petals, feather art, millefiori crystal and Japanese maki-é lacquer. Some even set off in search of virgin territory: a Manufacture such as Cartier has a team dedicated to just that. These outriders have returned from their missions with agate cameo sculpting, Etruscan granulation, glass micro-mosaic and Liquidmetal incrustation (see Magnificent métiers d’art). But do these skills, however brilliantly mastered, make the timepieces they embellish objects of artistic value, or even artworks in themselves?

In an interview to Swissinfo, the news portal of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, Ludwig Oechslin, former director of the Musée International d’Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and a specialist and inventor of complex mechanical movements, put the question into perspective: “Until the 1970s crisis, Swiss watchmakers believed their best argument to be the practicality and precision of their watches. Only after the crisis had passed did it occur to them that the watch’s mechanics had a beauty and an interest of their own, and begin to play on that. Swiss watchmaking survived thanks to this paradigm shift.” So do the métiers d’art impart that extra measure which transforms a timepiece into the highest summit of art? Franco Cologni, chairman of the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie Cultural Council, isn’t convinced: “Much as the theatre is about teamwork, the métiers d’art make a common contribution which serves to transform an object into something exceptional. In this respect, the watchmaker’s art is not Art with a capital A but art applied to watchmaking. Which is not the same thing.”

Watches now rank alongside contemporary art...
Supreme expression

Watchmaking’s prevalence at auction is another unmistakable sign of this new aura, as are the stratospheric prices achieved by certain timepieces. These past two years, no fewer than eight Patek Philippe have flown off the block at Christie’s for more than EUR 2,000,000 each. Watches now rank alongside contemporary art, paintings by the old masters, or Greco-Roman antiquities. One could almost forget that these objects have a function, which is to keep time. “Since the advent of quartz in the 1970s, the mechanical movement has become technically obsolete,” confided Maximilian Büsser, founder of MB&F, to Europastar. “From that point on there is no reason why the mechanical watch should be anything other than an artwork, produced as a one-off or as multiples, exactly as artists do. Alas, there aren’t enough egos in watchmaking, enough people who think not in terms of what the market wants, but in terms of what they want to create, with no real concern for how others might respond.”

Such a context paves the way for a form of watchmaking that is an alliance of technique and the métiers d’art, and which also gives a voice to artists, something Greubel Forsey has done with micro-sculptor Willard Wigan. Yet while no-one would deny the extraordinary nature of these pieces, they cannot divest themselves entirely of commercial connotations. Without wishing to enter the vast debate of what ultimately makes an artist – whether it is their ability to seduce the public, or their creative faculties -, watchmaking has nonetheless answered the question in its own way. It would be inconceivable for any firm to produce a watch as a pure statement; a timepiece must satisfy the deepest desires of its future wearer, however intent they may be on finding the supreme expression of the measurement of time.

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