This earned the watch design its “Museum Watch” moniker, which stuck. Horwitt kept one for himself, while the other two went to two museums in New York – the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. However, it was only in 1959 that Horwitt was finally able to commission Vacheron & Constantin-LeCoultre, the American entity that was set up to import the two Swiss brands’ watches into the country, to produce three examples of his design. This even resulted in a lawsuit that the two parties finally settled in 1975. While Zenith Movado is believed to have produced the first watches inspired by his designs, initially it was not with the designer’s permission. While the design is today viewed as a milestone, straddling the worlds of horology and art, not many brands Horwitt presented it to at the time considered it suited to watchmaking. The hands were long and thin, not unlike the ones on Bauhaus-inspired watches coming out of Europe. It wore a silver dot at 12 o’ clock, the only overt design element on the watch face, which symbolised the sun at high noon. The dial, pitch black, had an almost enamel-like quality to it. His design, completely devoid of any hour or minute markers, took the minimal aesthetic right to its limits. In 1947 Nathan George Horwitt, an American industrial designer, created his interpretation of the design movement of the day when he sketched the layout that is now synonymous with Movado. While the aesthetic in Europe was clearly Germanic, with an emphasis on the function of accurately telling the time, a very different take on minimal watchmaking was taking shape across the Atlantic. The whole purpose is to illustrate a conceptual idea.” Therefore, it serves no practical purpose. Minimalists wanted their objects, as they referred to them, to only be of their own reality and not reflect or refer to something else. “The conceptual idea was that art should have its own reality, it shouldn’t imitate something else, like an image of a landscape, still life, or a portrait would. “It is based on simple geometric forms – mostly the square and rectangle,” says Levin. What we can say for certain is that minimalism refers to a very specific era in the art world that started in the United States in the early 1960s. While it is understandable why this became the case, it is not entirely clear when this practice started. It is used to refer to any reduction of a thing to its essential structure,” says Todd Levin, a veteran art advisor whose collection includes pieces from independent makers such as Philippe Dufour and George Daniels. “Today minimalism in design is a modern lifestyle buzzword. This is an essential starting point, when the term often associated with a pared-back design in watchmaking has very real meaning in the art world. To understand what minimalism means in the context of watchmaking, it is helpful to start off by defining that which it absolutely does not refer to. So what then is minimalism when it comes to watch design? Is it simply marked by an absence of design elements rather than the presence of key defining characteristics? Moreover, is there a line beyond which minimal design risks going too far? That is if we agree that the line, for the sake of this discussion, is performing the very basic functions of a watch by informing or engaging visually. It probably goes without saying, as is the case with any such term that becomes a part of our everyday lexicon, it has become far removed from the 1960s’ artistic movement it shares its name with. Then there is the term ‘minimalism’ itself. will agree that clubbing these disparate design philosophies under the often-abused blanket term of ‘minimalism’ does the watchmakers a disservice. Anyone who is familiar with brands such as Nomos, Ressence, Ochs und Junior or H. The aesthetic is often dismissively referred to as minimalistic. To some, this is the road to clarity of visual language, while others in recent times have taken to this philosophy almost in opposition to the established standards in watchmaking and the premium it places on decoration and complexity. However, for almost 100 years, there has existed a small subset of watch designers and brands that have opted for a more pared-back aesthetic. A quick search of terms such as guilloché, anglage or Zaratsu polishing will prove just how closely watchmaking is linked to such adornment. Much has been written about the over-the-top ornamentation or complexity usually associated with traditional watchmaking.
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