Heated Controversy: Warming Bernard Berenson's Wristwatch

 (The following blog first appeared on my companion website Wrist Watch Redux in February 2016.) 

Two of my favorite things:  Deep-dive research and wristwatch vignettes -- those idiosyncratic incidents that put a wristwatch at the center of a memorable tale.

Here my focus is on Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) who is often acknowledged as the 20th Century's greatest art historian of the Italian Renaissance, his wrist and his wristwatch.

Bernard Berenson. Photo appearing in Italophile Book Reviews,  http://italophilebookreviews.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-florentinevenetian-painters-of.html.
Photographer and date of original unknown.

In Meryle Secrest's 1979 biography, Being Bernard Berenson, the author spends one page (384) retelling an amusingly controversial  incident.

Principally it  involves three of Berenson's intimates and an unnamed journalist.

Character No. 1 is Igor Markevitch, a Ukranian-born composer and conductor. He and his wife spent seven years living with Berenson, his wife Mary, and his secretary Nicky Mariano at a villino on the grounds of "i Tatti," Berenson's Tuscan estate outside of Florence, Italy;

Character No. 2 is Bertram M. Goldsmith, a Post-World War II American friend of Berenson  who served as Military Governor of Florence after the city's liberation in August 1944. He and his wife frequently visited Berenson.

Character(s) No. 3 is Berenson, or more specifically the man, his wrist and the watch that he wore.

This is how the story goes according to Secrest:

(Quoting Markevitch): "One day after the liberation of Florence a journalist came to interview me about Berenson. He was so persistent that I got bored and to amuse myself, I started inventing stories. I said that Berenson was just like the princess and the pea, who felt the lump through seventeen mattresses, and that he even had to have his watch warmed for him. After the journalist left I told Berenson about it and we had a good laugh."

(Quoting Goldsmith): "It's true! [the watch-warming story]. I saw it with my own eyes!" He goes on to say that on one of his postwar visits at i Tatti, he and his wife were having aperitifs with Berenson and Nicky when  "all of a sudden a butler arrived carrying a red velvet cushion. On the cushion was a white towel and on the towel a was a warmed watch. We asked about it and Nicky Mariano explained, 'We never let him put his watch on, because of the shock of the cold against his arm.'"

Prior to Secrest's publishing the story in 1979, the warmed watch tale circulated in the postwar popular media. Life Magazine, April 11, 1949 said in its article, "Life Calls on Bernard Berenson,":

"He leads a highly punctilious and fastidious daily life under the watch of and supervision of his secretary, Nicky Mariano. Promptly at 6 a.m., B.B. awakens, and propped up on his canopied bed, reads, writes or receives visitors until 10, when he gets up. A vase of fresh flowers is placed in his room, and a butler warms up B.B.'s wrist watch, which he finds unpleasant to strap on when it is cold."

Berenson would have been 84 at the time of this Life article. 

Bernard Berenson at rest. Photo appearing in the archives of Writers at Work http://writersatwork.pfauth.com/post/21971201256/bernard-berenson
Photographer and date of original unknown.

For me, the intriguing aspect of this vignette is its ultimate inconclusiveness.

Who is to say that the joke was really on Markevitch and Berenson was the jokester letting his friend think that he had fabricated what was really the truth?

Or was what started out as Markevitch's fabricated detail of toilette to become for Berenson a part of his morning and afternoon daily routines?

Both would be in keeping with one of Berenson's famous quotes:

"Give us today our daily idea and forgive us all those we thought yesterday."

(Note: Meryle Secrest is a noted American biographer who has written books on Romaine Brooks, Kenneth Clark, Salvador Dalí, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Rodgers, Joseph Lord Duveen, Amedeo Modigliani, and Elsa Schiaperelli.) 

Artistry, Deception and Time: Watch Closely What You See

In today's international artscape just as in horology, the authenticity of a work or a timepiece is of paramount concern to owners, investors, and collectors.

Beauty and function must be real to be given full value and appreciation.

In the past, forged works of art, we can also call them counterfeits, depended on exposure by a connoisseur -- the art dealer, art historian, curator or consultant who had the eye as well as access to the piece's provenance.

Today, scientific testing, ocular instruments and computer technologies are the new sleuthing tools for amateur as well as seasoned connoisseurs. These tools are becoming increasingly important in detecting counterfeit drawings, paintings, sculpture AND luxury wrist watches.

I'm pleased that Adam Harris, National Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC) Museum Guest Curator and Educator has written and teaches about how he differentiates genuine luxury watches from fake ones.

Mr. Harris provides us with a summary of modern -- and accessible tools for watch aficionados  to expand their authenticity-confirming knowledge.

In Adam's recent article, he explains how to verify luxury wrist watches' sapphire crystal from glass dial coverings and how to examine the delicate finishing of  such watches' internal movements.

Modern Tools for the Watch Evaluator Toolbox

 (Permission given by author to reprint to his article for this blog)

William Shakespeare once wrote that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio than are dreamt in your philosophy.” (Hamlet) – suggesting that knowledge is limited.

When it comes to counterfeit luxury watches, there is nothing more appropriate.  Similarities and likenesses that we believed the counterfeiters could never have achieved are now becoming a reality.  We need to better tools and techniques to aid us to differentiate the genuine from the fake. I am therefore going to explain, some of the tools that evaluators of genuine watches should have in their arsenal of tools to help differentiate genuine from fake pieces. These tools are all covered in depth in the National Association of Watch & Clock Collector’s course: Luxury or Lie? ™ How to Identify Genuine Watches.

Let’s start with the crystal, the material that covers the dial.  Most manufacturers have now moved from plastic, to glass, and recently sapphire crystal.  For example, Rolex started using sapphire crystals in the mid-70s in preference to glass due to its improved anti-scratch properties, and most luxury manufacturers quickly followed suit.

There are a number of subjective techniques to determine if the crystal is glass or sapphire that have been passed down among the profession ranging from:

•    feeling it with your tongue (don’t ask how it works)
•    the tapping method; where a sapphire will emit a low frequency sound
•    viewing from the side; mineral glass (like most glass) has a green tint whereas sapphire is white or clear, depending on the quality of the material & finish
•    the finger test (performed at normal room temperature) - mineral glass always feels cool to the touch, while sapphire feels like room temperature. 

Surely we have something more scientific than any of these!  Well we do have the “water beading” test. Placing a drop of water on a glass just spreads out all over the glass, while placing a drop of water on a sapphire causes a tightly held bead of water, like the example photos below:

You should be able to easily see on the Rolex with the red/blue bezel the tight “bead” of the water, while on the other watch the water spread out over the glass.  This tool/test is slightly more technical than the earlier ideas, but hardly the most efficient.

Thankfully, there is much more scientific and accurate way of testing the composition of the crystal.  This low cost tool is a must for anyone evaluating the authenticity of watches, and most people working with jewelry evaluation would already have this tool in their workshop. A low cost diamond tester, designed by the diamond industry to determine genuine diamonds from fake glass, can also be used to determine glass from a sapphire crystal.

Using this under $80 tool glass shows as green (perfect insulator), diamonds show red (and beep), and a sapphire crystal shows as orange, following in-between glass and diamond.

This tool can now be used to tell if a crystal is truly sapphire and also if the cyclops (the small magnifying glass over the date (on a Rolex) (is this only on Rolex or all cyclops?) is genuine.  Also this simple tool can also determine if certain bezels are 100% genuine on luxury watches, but you need to attend the course for that “tip”.  Pretty good for an $80 item!

Another essential tool is a good loupe, and especially when dealing with small watch parts, an illuminated loupe is best to help spot the tiny differences seen on counterfeit watch dials and movements versus genuine watches.

This tool is a 40X LED illuminated magnifier loupe with a very strong light – a must for under $5!

Here is an example where the above illuminated 40X loupe becomes an essential tool.
This miniscule anti-counterfeit “Laser Etched Crown” (LEC) on modern Rolex sapphire crystals cannot be seen with the naked eye, or with a low-powered loupe, however it is easily seen with an 40x illuminated loupe.

But not even these high powered illuminated loupes can always allow us enough magnification to spot the errors in some “Ultra Super Fakes” and in those cases, a  high definition 500X digital microscope is the best tool a watch valuator can have in their toolbox.  These microscopes are compact desktop units that can be stand-a-lone with their built in display, or attached to a computer for even greater flexibility.  The example below can be bought for about $300 and allow us to examine very closely movement and dial photos like this:

Or by connecting to a computer it gives the user even greater flexibility and definition using the larger monitor:

This amazing tool allows us to very closely examine the finish on movements. Swiss movements are finished to a variety of different levels depending on the price you pay for the watch. The highest levels of hand-work are reserved for the exclusive haute-horologie brands such as Patek Philippe, Breguet, and Audemars Piguet.  However, even less commercial brands will have some degree of finishing to them.  When the counterfeiters try to copy these processes, they produce a rougher result or finish.  Using a HD microscope you can see genuine examples of “luxury” Swiss brand movement finishes.

In today’s world of counterfeits, one can never take a watch at face value and as the secondary market grows for pre-owned luxury timepieces, jewelers, auctioneers, appraisers, and pawnbrokers are all increasingly likely to be faced with potentially highly counterfeit/fake watches. Having an arsenal of tools that can help in the evaluation of genuine watches is one way to help protect against the counterfeit market, however; knowledge is the most powerful tool of them all. Those involved in evaluating watches for authenticity should always keep up with the latest information from manufacturers and continue to seek education in the latest trends and techniques in identifying genuine watches so not to be deceived by counterfeiters. 

Adam R. Harris is the course developer and instructor of Luxury or Lie™ How to Identify Genuine Watches and Time is Money: Researching, Identifying, and Valuing Wrist and Pocket Watches  courses offered through the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors Inc , Columbia, PA. For details about the next course contact: info@luxuryorlie.com

Making Time for Kazimir Malevich

(Note to Reader: The following post was originally published in August 2014 on my wristwatch companion website, Wrist Watch Redux .  Some of the watches pictured here are no longer available from their sources. I am in the process of updating the source information as I receive it.)

Since October 2013, Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), one of the most significant 20^th Century Russian avant-garde artists  has had major successive exhibitions of his work at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; *; the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn; and the Tate Modern, London.** The Tate Modern exhibition closes on October 26, 2014.

However, Malevich  aficionados  can continue to wear a diverse group of reproductions representative of his many stylistic periods including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Primitivism, Cubism, Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, and Neoclassicism.  Primarily offered through Zazzle, the online retailer, the following  mini-gallery also includes a contemporary artist’s digital derivative from a Malevitch  photograph and the Tate Modern's own Push Watch exclusive to its Malevich exhibition's Museum Shop's product rang    Whether you agree with such appropriated image commercialism or not, it's testimony to Malevich’s creative “fearlessness” as described by Robert Chandler is an excellent article in New York Review, October 9, 2014.   

Here are some favorite selections from my own Malevich gallery:  

 The Knife Grinder (Principle of Glittering), 1912-1913. The dial image is done in Malevich's Cubo-Futurist style and is one of a series of works depicting the everyday lives of peasants in animated, almost frenzied three-dimensional movements.

Attentive Worker, pencil on paper, 1913.  The dial image depicts one of the costume designs done by Malevich for  Aleksei Kruchenykh's Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun. Malevich also did the sets for the production.

 

An Englishman in Moscow, oil on canvas, 1914.  Cubist-influenced, the dial image  incorporates many different overlapping  objects, including a face (possibly Malevich or Futurist David Burlyuk), fish and bayonet, on many different scales. 

 

 Suprematism, oil on canvas, 1915. Malevich uses colored geometrical elements on a dynamic axis as the fundamental organizing element for the image. He chose the word Supermatism to describe his own paintings in a 1915 exhibit. It was the first movement to reduce painting to pure geometric abstraction.

 

Portrait of Artist's Wife N.A. Malevich, oil on canvas, 1933. Late in life, Malevich returned to a Neoclassical style and used it in this portrait as well as his own self-portrait (1933) depicted below .

My Dear Malevich is the creation of Houston documentary photographer Tom R. Chambers.   Called a Pixelscape, it was "found  within a photo of Malevich via magnification, filter treatment [halftone] and isolation of the pixel(s) in Photoshop."

 

The Tate Modern's Push Watch described as "Unisex, original and quirky....Simply 'push' and the time is shown in a blue LED. The design was specifically created for the Tate exhibition.  It comes in orange (pictured), black, red and blue.

* Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde:  Featuring Selections form the Khardzhiev and  Costakis Collections.  Catalog of the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum by Sophie Tates, Karen Kelly, Bart Rutten, and Geurt Imanse. Amsterdam: Stedelijk, 2014.

** Malevich [Catalog of the Tate Exhibition] edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume. London: Tate Publishing, (March) 2015.