Cartier has converted its boutique at 35 Rue du Rhône in Geneva into an exhibition space for 22 historic watches from the Cartier Collection. The show, titled “Watchmaker of Shapes, Master of Crafts”, runs until 14 November and coincides with the tenth edition of Cartier Privé. Together the watches trace nearly 180 years of Cartier’s watchmaking heritage.
The selection covers more than a century of design, from the early 20th century to the 2010s, and highlights the shapes that defined the house: Tank, Tortue, Tonneau, Cloche and Crash. Among the pieces are a 1926 Santos in yellow and rose gold, a 1990 Crash in platinum and rose gold, and a Tank from 1920. The first Tank watches appeared at the end of 1919, and the name “Normale” was only added later, once variations began to appear. The scenography uses brushed gold, warm wood, curved forms and carefully controlled light.
Pascale Lepeu, director of the Cartier Collection, said the aim was to present Cartier as a watchmaker of shapes and crafts, with a selection never shown in this way before. Born in Paris and living in Switzerland since the early 1990s, she joined the collection in 1993, working first with its founding director Eric Nussbaum, and became curator in 2003. “My mission is primarily to preserve an extraordinary heritage,” she said.
The collection, founded in 1983, holds more than 3,500 pieces of jewellery, watches and precious objects, including about 1,350 watches and clocks, nearly 1,000 of them wristwatches. It has supplied more than 45 solo museum exhibitions around the world since 1989. Archive records, some kept by staff in the 1980s, allow the team to date pieces precisely and to identify later changes such as replaced stones, signatures or components, which Lepeu says adds enormous value.
Cartier Privé, launched in 2015 as a laboratory for reinterpreting the house’s icons, has revisited models including the Crash, Tank Cintrée, Tonneau, Tank Asymétrique, Cloche, Tank Chinoise, Tank Normale, Tortue and Tank à Guichets. Its tenth edition returns to three: the Tank Normale, the Tortue Monopusher Chronograph and the Crash Skeleton, all in platinum with burgundy accents. Platinum was one of the emblematic materials of modern jewellery in Cartier’s early 20th-century history, which ties the new pieces to the archive. Visitors to the Geneva show register through Cartier’s website.
