Art Attack

Talking Pieces

Watchmakers are also providing alternatives for those who are looking to decorate their homes, and not their wrists.

Hermes has partnered with the makers of the Atmos movement, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and French glass artists Les Cristalleries de St Louis to present a table clock where crystal meshes organically with metal. Hermes designed the clock that forms the base of the hive-like structure, fitted with the Atmos movement, an almost perpetual-winding mechanism that needs no batteries, electrical current or winding of any sort to measure time. The Atmos uses temperature fluctuations to turn the clock’s mainspring.

A spherical structure then encloses the clock, a delicate metal framework made from extra-white mineral glass and white enamel that uses the doublé or double overlay technique (where several layers of glass are coated over each other and then combined with enamel) that only six master glassmakers in Les Cristalleries de St Louis are able to do. The result is the 176-piece limited edition Atmos Hermes Clock.

Jaeger-LeCoultre has released the fifth work in its series of Atmos clocks created in tribute to Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. Inspired by a famous frieze that is displayed in Brussels’ Stoclet House,  The Waiting, the original marble and coloured stone mosaic has been meticulously rendered in wood marquetry of more than 1,400 pieces and 35 wood varieties. A button slides open the wooden outer case and reveals an Atmos clock housed inside an inner glass crystal cabinet. The clock features a large mother-of-pearl coated dial for the minutes, with five-minute markers in petrified wood, and a 60-minute marker made from a cushion-cut yellow sapphire. A graduated 24-hour scale and month indication appears around the circumference of the moon-phase display. Limited to 10 pieces, this is an amazing piece of work.