Andy Warhol owned more than 300 timepieces, or at least that was the number in Sotheby’s catalogs for a 1988 estate sale that included the Pop Art master’s watches.
One might expect some horological kitsch from a man who collected everything from plastic toys to Fiestaware, the colorful Art Deco-style tableware. But with few exceptions, Mr. Warhol’s watches were precious metal timepieces, usually from renowned Swiss brands.
With Mr. Warhol, “you’ve got gold integrated-bracelet dress watches, and you’ve got unusual stepped-case things combined with very traditional Patek Philippe and Movado, sort of midcentury classics,” said James Lamdin, the founder of the vintage watch retailer Analog:Shift in New York City.
The Sotheby’s catalogs listed the artist’s collection as including 45 Rolexes, 27 Cartiers, 24 Vacheron Constantins, 23 Patek Philippes, nine Piagets, eight Omegas and seven Audemars Piguets. The rest were also mostly Swiss, with a smattering of American brands, such as Hamilton, Waltham and Elgin.
Few of Mr. Warhol’s timepieces have surfaced on the collecting circuit since the 1988 sale, although in March 2023 Sotheby’s sold his Patek Philippe Ref. 2526, a time-only watch from 1955 co-signed by the Venezuelan jeweler Serpico y Laino, for $101,600, significantly more than the high sale estimate of $80,000. And in 2019, Christie’s sold his Rolex Ref. 3525, a rare steel and pink-gold chronograph from 1943, for 471,000 Swiss francs (now $583,955).
“I think Andy Warhol was really someone driven by aesthetics, as well as someone that was sensitive to consumerism, and to the precious nature of specific objects,” said Remi Guillemin, the head of watches for Europe at Christie’s in Geneva.
The scope and quality of Mr. Warhol’s collection continue to be legendary among those familiar with it today, but more broadly his collection remains unknown. This is partly because Sotheby’s sold his watches piecemeal to anonymous bidders during the highly attended auctions of 1988, and partly because wristwatch collecting was then a nascent and mostly obscure pursuit carried out by individuals not yet knit into a community by the internet.
Piecing together the story of Mr. Warhol’s watch collection — as well as his relationship to the specific models and brands that he favored — forms a fascinating picture of both the famed artist’s horological tastes and the rarefied milieu in which he built his vast collection.
‘The Watch to Wear’
“When I think of him, I think of the Cartier Tank,” said Wei Koh, the founder of the watch-focused Revolution Media in Singapore and the host of the “Man of the Hour” documentary series on the Discovery Channel platforms.
Mr. Warhol was frequently photographed wearing a Tank and, in an often quoted statement, was to have said, “I don’t wear a Tank to tell time. In fact, I never wind it up. I wear it because it is the watch to wear!” (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Yves Saint Laurent and Muhammad Ali — each of whom the artist befriended and featured in his vibrant silk screens — also regularly wore Cartier Tanks.)
Mr. Koh said he also associates Mr. Warhol with a yellow gold 37-millimeter Patek Philippe Ref. 3448, the first self-winding perpetual calendar watch, introduced in 1962. The artist’s piece was manufactured in 1977, sold in 1988 at Sotheby’s and again in 2023 at Christie’s for $378,000.
“It’s just so sexy,” Mr. Koh said of the Patek piece. “And just to imagine that he wore that like dancing around Studio 54 or whatever.”
Ties to Piaget
Although Mr. Warhol didn’t own all that many Piagets, today he is strongly associated with the Swiss brand through its partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which oversees his legacy.
“He started to be a client of Piaget in 1970,” said Jean-Bernard Forot, the brand’s head of patrimony. “In 1973, so three years later, he bought the watch that bears his name today.”
That watch was a quartz model in an 18-karat gold cushion-shape case with a black onyx dial, originally called the Black Tie. Piaget now offers numerous variations in its Andy Warhol Collection.
During the 1970s, Mr. Forot said, Mr. Warhol also bought a rare octagonal Piaget watch, an elaborately crafted cuff watch and eventually a few of the Piaget Polo models that debuted in 1979, effectively, he noted, “following the evolution of style at Piaget.”
The brand bought four of those watches at the Sotheby’s 1988 auction, and they remain in the company’s private collection. As for the other Piaget watches that the artist owned, “we are still looking,” Mr. Forot said.
High-Low Style
Mr. Warhol made a career of intermingling high and low culture, a style that extended to his personal look, with his high-end watches contrasting with his everyday attire.
While the British stylist Ray Petri is often credited with inventing high-low fashion in the 1980s, photographs from the 1960s show Mr. Warhol pairing his gold dress watches with T-shirts, denim and black leather.
“It’s interesting from a stylistic perspective to see how he made an evolution,” Mr. Koh said. “If you look at him in the 1960s, he was all like black turtlenecks and leather jackets and wraparound sunglasses, not unlike the Velvet Underground.
“By the ‘70s and certainly into the ‘80s, he’d adopted a very different style. A New York preppy style, kind of like the New York version of the style that David Hockney liked to wear.”
Only two of Mr. Warhol’s timepieces were tool watches, the industry term for timepieces designed for professional uses: a rare 38-millimeter Rolex GMT Master Ref. 6542 from the 1950s, designed for pilots to track time zones, and a 42-millimeter Omega Speedmaster Professional from 1969, originally designed to record speeds in auto racing.
For some experts, the specific models that Mr. Warhol owned indicate that the artist had both deep horological knowledge and a good eye.
“So, he had this amazing Ref. 2526, which was Patek Philippe’s first self-winding wristwatch, introduced in 1953,” said Paul Boutros, the deputy chairman and head of watches, Americas at Phillips in New York City. “And Andy Warhol had one with an enamel dial and applied Breguet numerals, which is the ultimate configuration for a 2526.
“The man had incredible taste.”
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