Do you know the Blum Collection ? It is worth discovering at the Time Crafters exhibit open this weekend at the Park Avenue Armory. Swiss businessman Peter Blum and his wife Linda assembled this most extensive collection of Swiss watches over the years. It was sold for $6.5 millions to an anonymous Chinese collector. The collection itself contains 4370 watches including many prototypes. There is a large display of the collection at the Armory. Each series of watches was a « Madeleine » to me.
1982 :The Skeleton model or the first time one could cheaply discover through the mechanism the guts of time. 1983 : The tennis stripes we could buy at Roland Garros ; 1984: The Don’t Be Too Late series . Remember offering that one to your girlfriend ? 1983: The quintessence of the Eighties : The Jelly Fish series : if you have a watch, be so cool as to choose it transparent! Or the Keith Haring series tagged by the artist with his irreverent dog.
And all those I cant remember as they are prototypes : the extraordinary Sam Francis ( 1992), the Vivienne Westwood special box ( 2001). And by the way Swatch does not mean Swiss Watch but Second Watch and I have used quite a few and I wish I had collected them !
Address: Park Avenue Armory at 643 Park Avenue, New York City
Open to the Public: Friday, September 14th and Saturday, September 15th from 10am to 8pm Ticket Entry: $20 at the door
captions: Photo 1- Alfred Hofkunst series Photo 2- The Blum Collection
Pascale Richard 