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Geneva’s Museum of Art and History
In partnership with GemGenève, the Museum of Art and History (MAH) is organizing an off-site exhibition featuring exceptional automata, musical, and other objets d’art from its collection. With a policy of promoting art and culture that dates back to the 18th century, MAH is now one of the leading museums in the world. This May, 25 small to medium-sized works of art created at the turn of the 19th century will be exhibited by MAH in an exclusive temporary display that will be open to GemGenève visitors. The show will also feature works on loan from the International Museum of Horology at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Swiss sculptor and automaton maker François Junod, as well as GemGenève exhibitors.
Following in the footsteps of the three previous exhibitions organized by GemGenève, this collaborative display illustrates the organizers’ desire to highlight the wealth of jewellery heritage and its relation to arts and crafts. It also raises the profile of acclaimed museum institutions such as the MAH by including them in the event’s cultural program.
The MAH Collection
‘Grinder’ automaton, colored gold and enamel
Geneva’s Museum of Art and History
Size: 7.7cm x 3.18cm x 1cm
Geneva’s Museum of Art and History is one of Switzerland’s largest museums. Deeply rooted in the city, it is a reflection both of local history and of the ties its citizens have formed with others all over the world. Watchmaking has a very special place at the museum: practiced since the 16th century, it went hand in hand with the expansion of far-reaching trade networks, bringing together converging technological innovations and developing exceptional expertise.
The wide range of items in the care of the MAH highlight watch mechanisms and related inventions in the field of mechanical art such as watch movements, musical boxes, and automata. The latter are something of a case apart blending technical prowess, history, philosophy and even magic.
Ormolu, enamel, silver, ivory, glass painting, polychrome glassware, painted metal
Ringing of hours on the hour, automatons and chimes on demand.
Geneva’s Museum of Art and History
Size: 90cm x 38cm x 33cm
The display being prepared for the GemGenève exhibition highlights the fascination exerted by the sounds and imitation gestures produced by automaton and musical box technology and machinery: tunes of the day, folk songs, more exotic melodies and animated genre scenes were all incorporated into an objet d’art.
25 small to medium-sized works of art created at the turn of the 19th century will be exhibited by the MAH in an exclusive, temporary display open to GemGenève visitors. The show will also feature works on loan from the International Museum of Horology at La Chaux-de-Fonds.
Guilloché gold, painted enamel cartouches, blued steel window, colored gold automata
Geneva’s Museum of Art and History
Brief History
By the turn of the 19th century, Geneva watchmakers had perfected timepieces’ accuracy and chimes, and so moved on to developing more sophisticated curiosities. The trend for repeater watches and automata (jacquemart watches) drew on know-how from the large clocks with automata made from the 14th century onwards.
In the words of F. Berthoud in the 1765 Encyclopaedia, horology was defined as “the science of movement”; as such, it was embodied not only by timepieces’ inner workings but also by their faces, featuring animated displays housed in sumptuous decorations visible on the hour, at each chime, or on demand.
These watches, most of which included a musical aspect, reached the apogee of their popularity around 1840. There was similar enthusiasm for mantelpiece clocks being turned into showpieces with the help of musical boxes and songbirds, resulting in creations inspired by daily life, pastoral scenes, or the circus. More often than not, displays were accompanied by music produced by simple musical boxes that could play one or more tunes, commissioned from specialist craftsmen and built into the base of the clock.
Benoît; Japy Frères, Geneva, Beaucourt (France), c.1852
Gilt bronze, painted wooden automatons, enamel dial, painted wooden base, glass dome
Hour and half hour chimes; music mechanism playing two tunes; cord activated
Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, Donation by [Mrs. Veuve] H. Chauvet, Geneva, 1924.
Size: 83cm x 49cm x 28cm
It was Geneva watchmaker Antoine Favre who invented the musical box in 1796. He hit on the idea of replacing the complex mechanism of belltowers’ hammers and bells (which had originally been adapted for use in watches and snuff boxes) by steel strips that would vibrate when struck by pins arranged around a cylinder.
Taking the opposite direction to the miniaturization evident in the shift from clocks to watches, musical box dimensions increased due to the technical requirements in terms of sound quality. As a result, the musical box industry took a separate path from watchmaking per se from around 1815 onwards. Output in Geneva peaked in around 1860 and then declined; the remaining manufacturers such as Japy and L’Epée were concentrated in the regions of Sainte-Croix and Beaucourt.
Capt & Janin, Geneva, Mende, c.1810
Polished, engraved gold, painted enamel
The automaton’s right arm plays the lyre throughout the melody (straight blade mechanism)
Geneva’s Museum of Art and History
GemGenève’s 2023 Project: Enhancing Heritage & Artistic Creation
In 1952, Geneva’s Watches and Jewels Association organized a major exhibition entitled ‘Music and Automata’ at the city’s Museum of Art and History (MAH) in a specially constructed setting evocative of shows, guinguette bars, festivals, and the circus.
This May 2023, it’s now the GemGenève exhibition’s turn to invite the MAH to stage a display on the same topic in a minimalist setting designed to offer a converging view of the works of art in question: automata clocks and watches, animated scenes, musical mechanisms and singing birds will be on show side by side to celebrate the skills of mechanical art and the many decorative crafts evidenced in the museum pieces, such as goldsmithing, jewel-smithing, and enameling.
The GemGenève exhibition’s promotion of an ‘off-site’ program is a good fit for the ‘off-site’ stance taken by the MAH itself. The museum implements this policy through partnerships with private and public-sector institutions who have in common the aim of preserving the heritage of watchmaking and mechanical art.
The international visibility offered by the exhibition is a way of drawing attention to these collections and raising interest in the heritage of ‘Watch Valley’ – a source of inspiration and a key reference in the field – among visitors and professionals alike. Partners and the general public can thus gain first-hand experience of the benefits of bringing together heritage collections and professional training institutes to highlight the various professions in the world of jewellery and related crafts – and their creative output.
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The above painting Starry Night Predator has become a very highly desired piece of art by collectors and dealers alike.
But, how does anybody know if indeed, they are in possession of a very valuable piece of art?
Everyone loves a rags to riches story, but for some unsuspecting people, proverbial “rags” actually ended up being worth millions — and they almost didn’t realise it.
The dream did come true for one particular guy according to “Fake or Fortune,” a show that sets out to establish whether a piece of art is a masterpiece or a fake.
The art market is a high-risk industry in which authentication is the sina qua non of merchantability.
In an era of increasing market valuations and ever-growing demand for fine art—either for the status it confers on its owners or its investment value—authentication is the art collector’s most frequent stumbling block.
Recently, authentication technology has become incredibly sophisticated, enabling scientists and historians to authenticate works based on minutiae as discrete as the lead in white paint or the weave of an individual bolt of canvas.
Simultaneously however, savvy art forgers are developing new ways to evade detection, through both artificial intelligence and already-present weaknesses in the market.
Nevertheless, American law has lagged behind in providing adequate protections for buyers.
Existing protections—a patchwork of contract, tort, and state statutory provisions—are incomplete and leave buyers bearing the risk of purchasing a forgery.
After many months of doing exhaustive forensic work – X-raying the painting, putting ultraviolet light on it, taking microscopic samples of paint from it and following the paper trail of this almost back, not quite but almost back to the moment it left the brush – we managed to establish it was genuine, “Fake or Fortune’s” presenter Fiona Bruce told BBC Radio.
“Fake or Fortune” determined that the painting it was scrutinizing was by the French Impressionist painter Édouard Vuillard, and worth about $410,000.
Keith Tutt, a lifelong Vuillard fan, saw the painting for sale at a local auction and was convinced it was a genuine Vuillard.
It was always thought to be by Édouard Vuillard but did not appear on the historical lists and was never a proven example of his work. Despite the lack of proof, Tutt gambled his life savings on buying the picture. It paid off big time.
But this is not the end of the story.
This painting was sold by art dealer Robert Warren, but it was not the first Vuillard he had sold – the painting was one of a pair. The other was sold on ebay in 2005 for £3000, or $4,930 at today’s exchange rate.
Yes, you read that right: A picture worth $410,000 was sold for less than $5,000 on ebay eight years ago. That’s an an 83-fold profit for the unknown buyer.
Sadly, Warren knew he had something good, and he spent years trying to prove the authenticity of the painting but could not get the evidence he needed to sell the painting at its correct value.
Eventually, he decided to put the painting up for auction, where it was purchased by its present owner, Keith Tutt.
The hunt is no longer on for the artist but for the buyer who purchased it on eBay in 2005.
Warren said he sold the painting so long ago that he could no longer identify the buyer, who might not know how valuable the painting is.
“Whoever bought this painting thinking it looks nice, they have a jolly good eye,” said “Fake or Fortune’s” Bruce.
But the painting would be hard to mistake: It is oval, 4 feet tall and colorfully portrays a man and a woman in a restaurant eating oysters, likely in France.
If that reminds anyone of a painting bought almost a decade ago, the first round of drinks is on you.
Blockchain is currently used by the company Verisart, which provides a website and application for artists and collectors to create certificates of authenticity for works.
The process for creating and later verifying a certificate of authenticity is as follows: “[t]he artist takes a picture of the work, adds its title and dimensions, the materials used and year of production and signs off like a normal certificate.”
Thereafter, “[t]he certificate is then given a URL allowing verification of provenance, as well as a cryptographically secure registry, which is time-stamped.”
The provenance of the piece is ultimately tracked through blockchain technology, making use of a decentralized, protected database.
Technology company Chronicled, Inc. has also developed “tamper-evident CryptoSeals” which can affix to an artwork and create a direct link to the artwork’s digital identity on a blockchain.
In theory, “[i]f someone comes into possession of an artwork with a Cryptoseal in 20 years, that person will still be able to verify it on a website backed by Chronicled’s infrastructure.”