Having previously collaborated with almost every major art museum in the world, from MoMA to the Louvre, Swatch has licensed four masterpieces of 20th-century art from the Guggenheim, including works on display in New York and Venice.

Accessibly priced, non-limited and available online, the Swatch x Guggenheim collection brings works from Monet, Degas, Klee, and Pollock to a wrist near you.

Initial thoughts

Painted dials have a long history in watchmaking, but the difficult nature of the work meant that for most of history they remained out of reach for all but the wealthiest clientele. While hand-painted dials are vanishingly rare and breathtakingly expensive, modern production methods mean that legendary masterpieces can now be easily scaled down and mass produced.

Swatch was a pioneer in this regard, introducing its first artist collaboration with Kiki Picasso in 1985, just two years after the company launched its revolutionary plastic watch. The Picasso collaboration was the first of many, and since then there’s hardly a major art museum that hasn’t licensed selected works to Swatch.

The works selected for this collaboration come from two different Guggenheim collections. Three of them are famously on display at the Guggenheim New York, while the fourth may be seen at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The odd-looking double-length seconds hand is an homage to this transatlantic duality.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Functionally, the four quartz-powered watches are identical, save for The Bavarian Don Giovanni’s animated dial. Like most Swatch products, they are fairly priced for what they are. In this case, the price of each watch is just over US$100. That’s affordable enough to tempt impulse-buyers, and makes for a compelling value proposition overall.

Two museums, four pieces

The four watches in the Swatch x Guggenheim collaboration are fully printed, dial and strap, with well-known masterpieces from the Guggenheim New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

The latter collection was assembled by Solomon R. Guggenheim’s niece Peggy, who was a celebrated patron of modern art. Given the canal-side location of the museum that bears her name, one might reasonably assume her collection includes Claude Monet’s The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (1908), but that work can be viewed on the Upper East Side.

Instead, Peggy Guggenheim primarily collected works of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. This stylistic focus is why Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy, painted in 1947, now resides on the Grand Canal.

Despite their namesake works being separated by the Atlantic ocean, both Palazzo Ducale and Alchemy share the same 41 mm case size. The similarity ends there, however, as the blue and orange tones of Monet’s masterpiece (which glow orange under ultraviolet light) are immediately appealing, while the savage energy of Pollock results in a more confrontational appearance.

Pollock’s work is arguably better suited to a wristwatch-sized format than the other three paintings due to its abstract, non-representational nature. As such, the work scales down quite well, and the watch looks like it could have been painted while on the wrist, whereas its counterparts are more obviously miniature facsimiles.

The other two paintings, Edgar Degas’s Dancers in Green and Yellow (1903) and Paul Klee’s The Bavarian Don Giovanni (1919), are also on display in New York, and have been brought to life in a smaller 34 mm size.

It’s fitting that a Swatch adorned with the work of a Swiss artist should be the one to hide a mechanical trick up its sleeve, and so it happens that the The Bavarian Don Giovanni is the only one of the four to feature a mechanically animated dial.

A cut-out at 12 o’clock gives way to a rotating image geared to the date wheel. Swatch has used this trick to good effect in the past with Turner’s Scarlet Sunset, and while the variation in appearance is not quite as dramatic on the The Bavarian Don Giovanni, it nonetheless helps bring a distinctly horological interest to what would otherwise be a static image. Interestingly, the most complicated of the quartet costs no more than the simpler Dancers in Green and Yellow.

Key facts and price

Swatch x Guggenheim Collection
Ref.SO28Z131 (Degas’s Dancers)
Ref. SO29Z150 (Monet’s Palazzo Ducale)
Ref. SO28Z703 (Klee’s Bavarian Don Giovanni)
Ref. SUOZ366 (Pollock’s Alchemy)

Diameter: 34 mm; 41 mm
Height: 8.75 mm; 9.85 mm
Material: Plastic
Water resistance: 30 m

Movement: Quartz
Functions: Hours and minutes

Strap: Silicone

Limited edition: No
Availability: Online and at Swatch boutiques
Price:
41 mm: Palazzo Ducale and Alchemy – US$115
34 mm: Dancers and Bavarian Don Giovanni – US$105

For more, visit swatch.com