Closed | Important watches – Saturday 15 November 2014

The world of watches has a lot to thank the legendary Suisse designer Gérald Genta (1931-2011) for, many of the classic wrist watches available today are designed or inspired by him. Genta first became a goldsmith in his twenties but had a hard time to find work. One day he got tired of it all, threw his tools in the river Rhône and swore never to work as a goldsmith or to be an employee again. Instead he started working with designing watches for different manufacturers. One of Genta’s first creations was the Polerouter for Universal Genève in 1954, but his big breakthrough didn’t come until 18 years later when he designed the Royal Oak for Audemars Piguet. The inspiration for this watch came from diving helmets from that time and he kept working with the marine theme later on as well. In 1976 he designed the big success Nautilus for Patek Philippe which reminds us a bit of portholes, and later the same year came his new design of the IWC model Ingenieur. That one also with clear inspiration from the marine world. Genta would come to design many more watch models for different brands, for example the Cartier Pasha and the Bvlgari Bvlgari, watches that are still manufactured and important for their brands today.

Later on Genta started his own eponymous brand and an exclusive contract with Walt Disney gave him the opportunity to use their well known characters. Auction item number 98 has Donald Duck on the dial and the time is shown in a bit unusual way called retrograde. The hands run in a curved line instead of a circle and jumps back to the starting position every twelfth hour.

Gérald Genta didn’t like to wear watches; he saw himself as an artist and did not want to be controlled by time. It’s lucky for us that he still liked to design them though.