Wrist Management

By: Jonathon Keats

March 2007

Late in the 1920s, a New York watch manufacturer named James Schulz set out to produce a

Patek Phillippe, "Grogan," gold, single-button, split-seconds chronograph with left-handed winder, 1925.

timepiece fit for Jay Gatsby; it was to be the most complicated wristwatch the world had ever seen. Hiring the finest craftsmen in Switzerland, Schulz combined the usual timekeeping mechanism with a stopwatch and chimes, a moonphase dial and a calendar accurate even in leap years, all smartly packed in a tonneau platinum case. He put an unprecedented $10,000 price tag on his invention but for years wouldn’t sell it to anyone. How could he? His timepiece, which was featured in Life magazine and would hold the record as the world’s most complicated wristwatch for six decades, was more famous than he was.

Nor has its fame diminished. At Christie’s Geneva last November, Schulz’s circa-1930 Ultra-Complicated wristwatch sold for $1,090,928, a price comparable with those of the most coveted pieces by the most prestigious maker, Patek Philippe. The same auction, though, also revealed an essential distinction between the two signatures: While the most basic Pateks were selling for $15,000 and more, a second, uncomplicated Schulz, estimated at a modest $1,200 to $2,000, was bought in.

“The Schulz Ultra-Complicated is unique, and also one of the most important watches historically,” explains Christie’s New York expert Adrienne Hines, noting that all kinds of complications—mechanical functions beyond straightforward timekeeping— are increasingly sought after. “But what usually gives a watch collectibility is the maker’s name.” And in vintage watches from the 1920s through the ’70s, two names stand above all others. “There’s no doubt that Patek and Rolex dominate,” says Julien Schaerer, an expert at Antiquorum, an international auction house that specializes in timepieces. “They represent 60 to 70 percent of the vintage market, and the prices are driven higher each year as new collectors enter the market looking for these two makes.”
Aside from their prominence, Patek and Rolex have almost nothing in common, which goes a long

James Schulz, Ultra-Complicated wristwatch with four subsidiary dials indicating phases of the moon, c. 1930.

way toward explaining why both are so coveted while other first- tier Old-World companies such as Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet are second-tier collectibles. “If you were looking for the best and most complicated watches in the world, you went to Patek Philippe,” says Bonhams & Butterfields Los Angeles expert Charles Tearle. “Rolex had a reputation for the most reliable mass-produced sports watches.” Each was the ultimate status symbol in its own domain, and, quips Tearle, “everyone always remembers the winner, not the runner-up.”

Price range may also play a role, Schaerer points out. “If you’re looking at collectible Pateks, prices start at $15,000 to $20,000 and go up to infinity. With prices starting in the $2,000 to $10,000 range, Rolex is accessible to many more collectors.” The sheer size of the Rolex market has made the brand less predictable than Patek and more sensitive to trends. For instance, as large stainless-steel sports watches have become fashionable in the past several years, the Rolex Daytona—a chronograph (or stopwatch) that retailed in the 1970s for $600—has escalated in value from $12,000 in 2004 to $30,000 and up today. A midsize gold Rolex bubbleback from the ’50s, on the other hand—which was the wristwatch to own in the ’80s—has held steady at $10,000 to $15,000 for two decades.

More dramatic even than the success of the Daytona has been the recent ascent of Panerai, built with a Rolex movement for frogmen in the Italian navy during World War II. “Ten years ago, nobody could imagine wearing a watch like that,” Schaerer recalls. “It was just a big, bulky military watch, and $5,000 was a strong price.” In December, Antiquorum sold the rare circa-1943 “Nijmegen Bridges Watch,” made for Italian navy commandos, for $61,360. Schaerer attributes the exponential growth partly to changing tastes, but also credits the re-emergence of Panerai as a brand in 1997. “People started collecting the limited editions of the new Panerai, and, once you’re a collector of the new Panerai, you start thinking, well, what could be better than to wear an historical one?”

The effect of new watches on their vintage counterparts is not limited to Panerai and Rolex. New companies specializing in unprecedented complications, such as Franck Muller and F.P. Journe, have generated interest in the vintage complicated watches of Patek, Vacheron and Audemars. And, from Breguet to Blancpain, Corum to Jaeger-LeCoultre, lavishly marketed high-grade watches have directed collector interest to their vintage forebears. “In particular, Cartier is having a surge,” says Aaron Rich, head of watches at Sotheby’s New York. “Cartier is so aggressive with the marketing of their modern watches—the Roadster and the Santos 100—that it generates a lot of collector interest in vintage models.” As an example, he cites a Cartier Grand Tank Cintrée, an elongated rectangular watch from 1930 that he recently sold for nearly $35,000. Another Cartier Tank, an Americaine from the late ’40s, sold at Bonhams in June for $111,500, more than four times the $22,500 to $27,500 estimate.

The reason, Tearle, explains, is condition. Purchased new in Paris, the watch was almost immediately put in a vault and remained untouched until the 2006 sale. “I’ve been in this business for more than 16 years, and it’s the best example I’ve ever seen,” he says, noting that his estimate was based on what the watch would be worth if it had been gently worn.
“Condition is number one,” concurs Miami dealer Massimo Barracca. “A watch can go for four or

Audemars Piguet, platinum-cushion wristwatch, c. 1929, retailed by Cartier.

five times the price because of condition.” Collectors can be as fastidious as in any field, from paintings to postage stamps. “You may have two watches and the dial has been cleaned on one, and that can halve the value,” says Hines, noting that the originality of hands is also important, as are the sharpness of the case and the visibility of hallmarks. Collectors are slightly less fanatical about the perfect originality of the movement, expecting some repairs, but cautious about larger-scale restoration that could amount to chicanery.

“Forgery is a huge problem, even in Patek Philippe,” Tearle says. “It’s hurt the market but added value to watches that have proven provenance.” The Tank he sold for $111,500 is one good example of this. Another is the 1950s Patek Philippe, with moonphases and perpetual calendar, given to investment banking pioneer Dean Witter by his wife in the ’50s, which Sotheby’s sold in December for $374,400 against an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000. Of course, a celebrity name helps: New York dealer Edward Faber, who has sold watches associated with Mae West and Louis Armstrong, recalls bidding Jackie Kennedy’s run-of-the-mill $2,500 Piaget up to $10,000—and still missing the $24,000 sale price by a landslide. But the price of Witter’s watch, according to Rich, had less to do with the fame of the owner than with the fact that the luminous hands were transitional between two Patek models and had never been seen on another example.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the distinction between the rare and the rarest of the rare more than the two Patek Philippes that by extraordinary coincidence sold in Geneva one day apart from each other last November. Both of them were gold, cushion-shape split-seconds chronographs—a highly unusual complication in the ’20s—two of five examples known worldwide, and both were given almost exactly the same estimate. Sotheby’s did respectably with theirs, hitting the midrange with a winning bid of $736,959. Christie’s, though, sold its watch for $1,897,600. The reason? Simple enough: The winder on the Christie’s example was on the left side, a unique commission for a left-handed wearer, an eccentricity immediately apparent even to the non-collector.

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Jonathon Keats is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine and is a conceptual artist.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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Antiquorum
New York
212.750.1103
www.antiquorum.com

Audemars Piguet
www.audemarspiguet.com

Blancpain
www.blancpain.ch

Breguet
001.41.2.18.41.90.90
www.breguet.ch

Cartier
800.227.8437
www.cartier.com

Corum
www.corum.ch

F.P. Journe
001.41.2.23.22.09.09
www.fpjourne.com

Franck Muller
212.463.8898
www.franckmuller.com

Jaeger-LeCoultre
www.jaeger-lecoultre.com

Panerai
www.panerai.com

Patek Philippe
212.218.1240
www.patek.com

Rolex
www.rolex.com

Vacheron Constantin
www.vacheron-constantin.com