The Best Art Inspired Watches

By Kim Parker

The worlds of art and watchmaking world share many similarities. The time, skill, aesthetics and emotions involved in both gives rise to natural parallels. Not to mention each industry boasts enthusiastic collectors, making crossovers and collaborations inevitable. Indeed, some of today’s best art inspired watches were themselves inspired by artistic movements.

Jaeger le-Coultre‘s Reverso watch from 1931, for example, owes its clean lines to the Art Deco movement of the 1920s. It was first created as a sports watch for British officers playing polo, with a reversible case to prevent the dial from being smashed. But its design has become so recognisable and iconic, it has hardly changed. It celebrated its 90th anniversary last year with a dedicated exhibition in Paris, which drew thousands of visitors.

Today, with digital timekeeping all around us, watches themselves could largely be considered objets d’art, though they still serve a practical function. So it’s no surprise that makers have increasingly collaborated with artists over the last few years to bring a fresh appeal to their timepieces. Especially when a ‘limited-edition’ label creates a frisson of excitement around any new release. And with each dial proving a natural tiny canvas, the best new art inspired watches can involve such exquisite hand painting, enamelling, gem setting, or marquetry, they would not look out of place in a museum.

Tempted to wear a little artwork of your own? Here, we look at some of the best new art inspired watches worth dreaming about right now.

Fans of Swatch’s previous collaborations with global art institutions like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Louvre in Paris and MoMA in New York will be delighted by its latest arty collection. The Swatch x Centre Pompidou collection reimagines six of the Pompidou’s most famous artworks by Frida Kahlo, Modigliani, Robert Delaunay, Mondrian and Vassily Kandinsky as statement timepieces. With striking colours and transparent detailing, these watches are able to bring the allure of the visual arts into your everyday wardrobe.

The new Cape Cod Crépuscule watch was four years in the making. In 2018, Hermès met with the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology, resulting in a project to create a watch dial from a silicon wafer. Designed by graphic artist Thanh-Phong Lê, the unique crepuscule (‘twilight’ in French) dial uses nanotechnology to achieve its mesmerising blue tint.

For Jaeger le-Coultre, the back of its legendary Reverso watch is as good a canvas as its dial. Its new Hidden Treasures editions of the Reverso each feature a major artist’s work, once thought to have been stolen or lost, hand-painted by the brand’s in-house team in enamel. As well as Gustave Courbet’s View of Lake Léman (1876) and Van Gogh’s Sunset at Montmajour (1888), there is also Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady (1917, featured above). This famous portrait is actually a double one, with Klimt’s original portrait of his beloved – who died very young – painted over with that of another woman later in his life. Each watch is restricted to a limited run of 10 pieces, meaning that once they are sold, these art inspired watches, too, will be gone forever.

The second in Hublot’s successful collaborations with the Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami, this Sapphire Rainbow watch ticked multiple trend boxes when it was released earlier this year. With Murakami’s signature ‘smiling flower’ picked out in a dazzling array of colourful gems, this investment timepiece taps into our current desire for rainbow-hued watches, as well as the vogue for cartoon-inspired watches.

Like this? See all the best new watches from LVMH Watch Week 2022