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In order to create the exceptional Metiers d’Art Les Masques Collection, VACHERON CONSTANTIN has collaborated with great persons, team and institutions. JEAN PAUL BARBIER-MUELLER has shown the Manufacture his confidence in lending them the world’s most important private collection of primitive art: masks from different continent that of the BARBIER MUELLER MUSEUM in Geneva, Switzerland.

French writer MICHEL BUTOR has contributed his poetic words to the creation of these brilliant timepieces. While his words invite us to remember that the faces – or the masks – reflect the stirrings of the soul, Vacheron Constantin’s team of designer has applied their watchmaking skill to lend them an additional dimension. They are the physical expression of the movement that makes a watch beat, always governed by a determination to “do better if possible, which is always possible”.

To know the extraordinary contributors of the Vacheron Constantin Tribal Mask Watches collection, should you read these.
THE BARBIER-MUELLER MUSEUM IN GENEVA

Geneva is privileged to be home to one of the largest and most beautiful collections of primitive art in the world: the Barbier-Mueller Museum.

To better appreciate the pioneering spirit that inspired Josef Mueller, the collection’s founder, we have to look at his early artistic emotions. When he was twenty, he used his entire year’s earnings to buy a painting by FERDINAND HODLER and, soon afterwards, went to Paris where he met the well-known art dealer AMBROISE VOLLARD. On the latter’s advice, he acquired an important and remarkable painting by Cézanne, the portrait of the JARDINIER VALLIER, painted in 1905 at the very end of the artist’s life. Cézanne was to become the father of modern painting. It was only by overcoming many difficulties that Josef Mueller rapidly built up a collection that, by 1918, already included seven Cézanne, five Matisse, five Renoir as well as paintings by Picasso,

Braque and many others by celebrated masters.

It was in the 1920’s that Josef Mueller discovered tribal art. During this period, there was a craze for all things exotic: African art, La Revue nègre and… Josephine Baker. Josef Mueller bought whatever took his fancy. Besides works of lesser interest, he acquired some magnificent pieces from leading Parisian dealers, one of whom, the celebrated CHARLES RATTON, sold him the Téké Tsaayi mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which had belonged to André Derain. Today, the collection includes many works that were once owned by those who, like DERAIN, VLAMINCK, TZARA and LHOTE, had discovered African art.

It was in 1952 that Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, a young man intent on building up his own collection, arrived on the scene. He was 22 when he met Monique, Josef Mueller’s daughter. They later married and amalgamated the two collections that, thanks to him

, have flourished ever since.

In May 1977, three months after Josef Mueller’s death, Monique and Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller opened the first museum to bear their name in Geneva. They opened the second, in Barcelona, in 1997. 2007 was a milestone year with the 100th anniversary of the Barbier-Mueller collection, the 30th anniversary of the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, and the 10th anniversary of the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Barcelona.

Barbier-Mueller Museum in Barcelona: Pre Colombian Arts

Barbier-Mueller Museum in Barcelona: Pre Colombian Arts

JEAN PAUL BARBIER-MUELLER

Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller was born in Geneva in 1930 and greatly influenced by a father who was passionate about everything: poetry, philosophy, music (one of his compositions was written in Seattle, in the United States, in 1985) and science (getting his Ph. D. in biology at the age of 47). After studying law in Geneva and London, Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller was called to the Bar, but soon afterwards went to work for a leading bank and, then, at the age of 28, became director of an investment company.

In 1960, he started up his own company, the Société Privée de Gérance, which specialises in property development and management for institutional investors and the construction of social housing. A collector like his father-in-law Josef Mueller, he specialises in “non-western” arts. In 1977, he and his wife Monique opened the Barbier-Mueller Museum. It has organised over seventy-five exhibitions, presenting different parts of the family collection. These exhibitions were organised in collaboration with leading museums in Europe, America and Asia, and the majority had important catalogues.Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller himself conducted or financed research projects in Sumatra, the Ivory Coast and Guinea.

In May 1997, the MUSEUM BARBIER-MUELLER d’ART PRECOLOMBI opened its doors in BARCELONA in the Nadal Palace. Inaugurated by Her Majesty Queen Sofia, the museum was the outcome of an enthusiastic response from the City Council to an offer to lend around 400 works of pre-Hispanic American art on a long-term basis. The Nadal Palace was restored for the purpose of exhibiting these pieces.

Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller also amassed a collection of early editions of Renaissance poets, which he began at the age of 13 and for which he gradually published a catalogue. He and his wife established the Barbier-Mueller Foundation in 1997 at the University of Geneva for the study of Italian Renaissance poetry. The Foundation received an endowment of around 200 volumes from the 15th and 16th centuries, a donation of considerable cultural value. New acquisitions have significantly enlarged this collection, which contained around 500 volumes in 2005. A catalogue was published by Professor Jean Balsamo in 2006.

Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller has been made Commander of the Legion of Honour and Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, as well as Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and Officer of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic. Recently, His Majesty the King of Spain awarded him the insignia of Grand Officer of the Order of Civil Merit. He is also an Officer of the Ivory Coast’s Order of Merit.

MICHEL BUTOR

Michel Butor was born on 14 September 1926 in the north of France. His father was an administrator for the Chemin de Fer du Nord and passionate about drawing, water-colour painting and wood engraving.

In 1929, MICHEL BUTOR’s family moved to Paris. With the exception of 1939-1940, the year of the “phoney war”, which he spent in Normandy, he did all his schooling there. After studying literature and philosophy at university, he left Paris to teach in the Nile Valley, in Egypt. He had been fascinated by writing for a long time when his first novels were published by Minuit. He continued his travels, which were both professional and exploratory, visiting Greece, Switzerland and the United States. He was appointed professor at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Arts and published various essays, narrations, poems and short stories. He then worked with painters, musicians and photographers who were keen to bring different forms of artistic expression together.

He has written two works for the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Le Congrès des cuillers and Un Jour nous construirons les pyramides, the latter to coincide with the publication and exhibition of a collection of pre-Pharaonic Egyptian artefacts. He continued to travel, visiting Japan, Australia and China. He retired in 1991 and now lives in Haute-Savoie, in France near Geneva.

Video of Michel Butor talking about literature

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