Pretty amazing work.
It is not often that the world of haute horlogerie vouchsafes a moment of artistic epiphany. But that is what happened recently at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. When I sat down to a dinner hosted by Geneva watchmaker Vacheron Constantin in the majestic Temple of Dendur, all I knew about the sculptures of Africa and Oceania was that they had ethnographic interest. But that was before the sprightly septuagenarian Monique Barbier-Mueller got up and talked about how her father, struck by the 1930s financial crisis and no longer able to afford pieces by Kandinsky, Picasso, and Matisse, moved into collecting African masks and ivories, and funeral canoes from the Solomon Islands. Her story was so compelling that I was forced to reappraise my understanding of the works on loan to the Met from her Geneva museum. – From Newsweek