Swiss watch company Swatch is the latest brand to partner with a major museum on a product collection. On Thursday, it announced the Swatch x Guggenheim Collection, featuring watches that translate pieces from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The artists featured include Edgar Degas, Paul Klee, Claude Monet and Jackson Pollock.
The pieces are the latest in Swatch’s larger Art Journey series, which launched in 2023. As part of the series, the company has partnered with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Jean-Michel Basquiat estate, the Rene Magritte estate, and others. Swatch has also partnered with the Guggenheim since the 1990s.
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“This collaboration was inspired by a long-standing shared belief between Swatch and the Guggenheim: art should be accessible, lived with, and experienced beyond museum walls,” Swatch’s CEO Vivian Stauffer told WWD via email. “By making iconic artworks wearable and playful, Swatch removes the distance that can sometimes exist between people and cultural institutions.”
The works referenced in the collection released Thursday are Degas’s Dancers in Green and Yellow (1903), Monet’s The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (1908), Klee’s The Bavarian Don Giovanni (1919), and Pollock’s Alchemy (1947).
“The artworks were chosen in close dialogue with the curatorial teams in New York and Venice,” Stauffer said. “Each piece was selected for its emotional impact, its importance within the Guggenheim collections, and its ability to translate meaningfully into the intimate format of a watch.”
