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For Immediate release January 30, 1997
Contact Kelly Santos 212-751-6716
and Livia Marotta 212-751-6702
Timeless
Movado's artful watches have become classics of design.
By Carol Vogel
Excerpted from Mirabella
Fifty years ago, an industrial designer named Nathan George Horwitt had an audacious idea for a watch: a plain, round, black face with a single dot at the top to mark the noon hour, and no numerals at all. Horwitt's startlingly austere design, inspired by the Bauhaus aesthetic of the day, has long been the company's hottest seller. Named "the Museum Watch" for its inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection in 1959, it has since attained the status of a modern classic.
The latest aspirant to this lofty position is the Vizio-a Swiss-designed stainless-steel watch with a bracelet that features brushed and polished surfaces. Created just over a year ago, it has spawned a host of variations to be introduced this year. They include a line of divers' watches and several two tone models with eighteen-karat-gold or stainless-steel links, sleekly packaged in a brushed-aluminum case.
The boldly adventurous design that is highlighted in the new Vizio line-and has long been the company's point of pride-is showcased at the Movado Museum. Tucked away on the second floor of Movado's Fifth Avenue flagship, this jewellike exhibition space is open to the public.
On display are pocket watches dating from the first decade of the century and more than seventy vintage pieces Movado has been buying back from private collectors and at auction for the past fourteen years. There is a snakeskin-banded silver wristwatch with a silvered matte face; a 1912 Polyplan watch, with a multilevel rectangular design, perfectly contoured to the wrist; and the Ermeto, a pocket or handbag watch in a rectangular case-made of leather, snakeskin, or enamel-that opens like a curtain to reveal its face.
In contrast to these primarily decorative pieces, Movado's 1914 Soldier's Watch is dramatically functional. Its pierced-metal cover protects its crystal, its luminous numerals are designed to tell time in the darkness of the trenches. There's a group of lapel watches, created in the '30s, shaped like wheels; others feature tiny round faces attached to carved-gold leaves.
Of the six artist-designed watches unveiled by the company in 1988, perhaps the best known is the Andy Warhol Times/5. Like his famous silk screens, Warhol's watch, produced a year after his death, features repeated images. Each of its five rectangular, stainless-steel eases-joined as a bracelet-contains a black-and-white Manhattan cityscape in place of a conventional face. Three years ago, one of Warhol's creations sold at Christie's in London for more than $23,000, proving that both artist and watch have a life well beyond Warhol's famously allotted fifteen minutes.
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