Swatch’s latest collaboration with the Guggenheim museums places famous 20th-century artworks directly on the wrist.
Created in partnership with the Guggenheim New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the new Swatch x Guggenheim Collection introduces four watches inspired by artworks by Edgar Degas, Paul Klee, Claude Monet and Jackson Pollock.
The project forms part of Swatch’s ongoing Art Journey, an initiative through which the Swiss watchmaker has worked with major cultural institutions to turn museum-held works into wearable form. The collaboration builds on a relationship between Swatch and the Guggenheim institutions that dates back to the early 1990s, during which the brand has supported exhibitions and initiatives across both New York and Venice.
The newest collection touches both sides of the Atlantic, drawing on three artworks from the Guggenheim New York and one from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where the timepieces were unveiled.
Each watch takes a single artwork as its starting point, translating its colour and composition onto the dial. Dancers in Green and Yellow, created by French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas in 1903, inspires a design that isolates the ballerina’s feet on the dial, while the straps are decorated with the dancers’ bodies and billowing tutus.
Claude Monet’s The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore, an Impressionist painting of the Doge’s Palace painted from a gondola in the Grand Canal in 1908 during his only trip to Venice, is the clearest nod to Venice in the new collection, with the palace’s façade rendered on a watch dial and the shimmering water’s shifting reflections carried across the strap. A playful touch appears when the dial is exposed to UV light, revealing a glow-in-the-dark effect and causing the dial to shine a vivid orange.
Paul Klee’s 1919 watercolour and ink work The Bavarian Don Giovanni lends its central figure to the corresponding watch dial, with names from the artwork printed along the strap, alongside a colour-changing calendar wheel. Finally, Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy, one of Pollock's most recognisable paintings, dating from 1947, and one of the most significant works in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, is translated into a watch that incorporates its its splattered patterns across both the dial and strap, in reference to the artist’s radical technique that involved pouring, splattering and dripping paint onto the canvas.
A double-length second hand appears across all four watches, referencing the transatlantic connection between the Guggenheim institutions in New York and Venice. And for watch lovers looking to support worthy causes, the new Swatches also support initiatives at the Guggenheim museums aimed at safeguarding artworks for future generations.