Dirty Girl Things
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Two
Dial Tones
Enamelists of the Swiss watch industry grope for a future.
by James Malcolmson, for Arts & Antiques Magazine
In some ways Dominique Baron seems much like the other artisans who practice the traditional craft of enameling in the French-Swiss Jura Mountains. Working from her home atelier in the town of Les Rousses just over the border in France, Baron is the master of a variety of techniques that she plies in the service of the internationally known Swiss watch brands who commission elaborate enamel dials. During the 18th and 19th centuries, such watches were important status symbols for aristocrats in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Van Cleef & Arpels’ “Lady Arpels Centenary” watch presents a simplified, modernized enamel painting technique on a rotating disk.
Today, Baron and a handful of fellow craftspeople are the last of a once-flourishing profession that has dwindled due to changing tastes and its own failure to train young apprentices. But unlike her peers, many of whom are elderly and in the twilight of their careers, Baron is in her mid-30s and something of a revolutionary in enameling circles. In cooperation with some of her watchmaking clients she is changing time-honored techniques to make them more responsive to modern tastes and, she hopes, to enable them to survive for years to come.
All the traditional enamel techniques (among which are grand feu, cloisonné and miniature painting) share the same basic properties. Powdered glass tinged with metal oxides for color is applied to a surface—in this case a watch dial—and then fired in an oven until it emerges with an intense translucence. The process is repeated many times to give depth and form an image, but doing so carries risk. Any given firing may crack the piece and ruin it altogether.
Grand feu uses extremely high temperature to achieve colors of exceptional color and quality. The pictorial art of cloisonné, on the other hand, uses a thin gold wire to create cells in which different enamel colors are laid, creating a mosaic-like effect. The most exalted art of enamel is undoubtedly miniature painting, which shares many characteristics with both oil and watercolor painting. Color is applied with a brush, but it must be applied in a strict order and riskily fired many times during the process.
Miniature painting on watches evolved from miniature enamel portraiture during the 17th century, especially in France. One early master, Jean Petitot, became famous for adapting vivid English watercolor techniques to enamels, working on both sides of the Channel. The genre soon became a highly prestigious form of vanity art throughout the courts of Europe, but as many of the artisans were Protestants, a large contingent sought refuge in Geneva after the religious persecutions of Louis XIV. There, they turned their attention to watches, perfecting their skills on beautiful enameled timepieces decades before watchmakers were able to achieve consistent accuracy. Their work is the overlooked basis for Switzerland’s reputation as a center for luxury watchmaking.
Miniature painting at the scale of a watch dial takes precision.
Considering their place in history, it is not surprising that the old enamel techniques are held in such reverence in Switzerland, even as they have faded into commercial irrelevance. Today, miniature painting in the Geneva style, the most traditional and prestigious form of the craft, is practiced by a small handful of mostly aging artists who may spend weeks or months on a single dial. They hoard their pigments, many of which were made by companies that closed decades ago. Customers can wait years for watches from companies like Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin, which take commissions mostly for reproductions of well-known 19th-century Romanticist and realist paintings. The wait is so long because of the manpower shortage; few young artists get the chance to learn the techniques. Baron experienced this first-hand. “The masters are reluctant to share their skills,” she says. “Sometimes they take apprentices but don’t show them everything.”
Baron herself managed to become a master of miniature painting, but she had to learn circuitously, in the process working with some of the companies that had begun to break with the enamel tradition. After graduating from art school, she accepted a job at Jaeger-LeCoultre under enamelist Miklos Merczel, who established his own style in the 1980s. Merczel is best known for his Art Nouveau-style reproductions of the work of Alphonse Mucha, which are often placed on the case back of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso model. These pieces feature brilliant coloration and fine detail, but are not true Geneva enamel, as they receive only half as many firings as in the traditional technique.
After leaving Jaeger-LeCoultre, Baron worked for a time at Roger Dubuis in Geneva, but her work on various subjects, some of it erotic, very much reflected the personal vision of the firm’s president, Carlos Diaz. Baron really hit her artistic stride when she took a position at the boutique Geneva watchmaker Delaneau, whose president, Christina Thevanez, is as obsessed with preserving traditional enamel techniques as she is with redefining women’s watch designs. Under Thevanez’s guidance, Baron was able to flourish as an artist capable of capturing a fine level of detail and expression, from the subtle coloration of a butterfly’s wings to the whiskers on a tiger.
While she still performs Geneva-style enamel for Delaneau, much of Baron’s time is now spent as a consultant for Stern Creations, a dial-making company through which she is bringing enamel to new audiences.
Dial design from Jaeger-LeCoultre’s latest enamel series, Reverso à Éclipses.
One of its clients, Van Cleef & Arpels, released some of this work last year in its “Lady Arpels Centenary” watch, which features a hand-painted enamel disk, only a part of which can be seen as it slowly rotates once per year. These pieces, like the work of Merczel, are fired less than the Geneva process, and are abstract, an area the traditional painters rarely touch.
Perfectionists like Thevanez, whose company, Delaneau, manufactures pieces in much more limited series, are quick to point out the difference. “True Geneva enamel should be perfectly smooth on the surface with no rough spots,” she explains. “You can easily tell the difference if you look carefully.”
Pieces like the “Lady Arpels Centenary” and its newer variants can made in much larger series at a more affordable price, because they do not require so many firings and can be executed by Stern Creation’s larger staff of young artisans. They have also achieved a level of commercial success that still eludes traditional pieces, particularly in the United States, where large series of branded pieces can be marketed much more easily than exquisite one-of-a-kind creations. In so doing, they offer the possibility of further life for all the techniques and for future enamelists to learn the craft.
“It was so hard for me to learn what I know,” Baron says. “It has been wonderful to be able to pass it along.”
James Malcolmson has been writing about the Swiss watch industry for more than 10 years. A frequent contributor to Robb Report, Chicago Social, Angeleno, Celebrated Living and several others, he visits the factories and workshops in Switzerland several times annually.
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Luxury Erotic Watches For Just Over $100k
From TrendHunter
They say you reach the classification of ‘Super Rich’ when you earn more interest that you can spend. I think you reach that point when spend over $100k on an erotic watch.
However, if you have the spare cash flow, why search for free porn on the net when you can buy a $160,000 watch with customized porn? Blancpain, an extremely high end watch company, has introduced its new line of Erotica Watches. Flip the classic watch over, and on the back, you’ll see a mechanically animated source of erotica.
“The two-sided nature of the erotic watch is aptly illustrated by Blancpain, one of the most stolidly conservative Swiss manufacturers and also one of the leading makers of the traditional erotic automaton watch. For $160,000, you can purchase a classic Villeret minute repeater with your choice of erotic scene underneath the sapphire caseback.” – Robb Report
If this is your style, but you don’t have the $160,000, you may want to check out Erotica Watches, who offers an array of automation watches for those of you looking to spend closer to $150.
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Erotic Watches through Time
From WatchLuxus
A (very) short history of erotica is achieveable by an attentive look at the collections of luxury watch brands.
In tribute to the couple that started it all: Corum’s Golden Bridge Adam et Eve. The handpainted miniature images required 36 hours of painting artistry and 15 hours to dry in various stages in an oven. Great time was involved to also delicately engrave the bridges and mainplate by hand, then expertly assemble some 137 components and encase them within four specially shaped and cut sapphire crystals. In the words of Corum: ‘Such a beautiful creation could only be a labour of love’.
Next, the period of Romanticism when greater importance was given to the emotions and the imagination. Depicted with Angular Momentum’s ‘Eglomise Romanticism’; sapphire crystal reverse painted by an artist. In the words of Angular Momentum: ‘A perfect fusion of elegance and technology, Angular Momentum watches catch the spirit of the time’.
Finally, Fortis Art Editions - a collection of watches designed by contemporary artists which ‘set different standards in the watch industry’. Pictured is a piece from the Charles Wilp collection which represents Wilps’ new strategy of product-advertising: sexy American Pin-Up-Girls from the American artist Mel Ramos and respectable brands.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
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