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Joël Pynson
March 2025
1. Times Watch and Walter Kampmann
Founded in Selzach in 1919 by Emil Gisiger, Times Watch was a manufacturer that exported its movements to the USA.
Its existence was brief: it disappeared in 1935.
Between 1921 and 1922, Times Watch published several advertisements in the Revue Internationale de l'Horlogerie, a Swiss trade periodical that had been in existence since 1900, which differed markedly from what was being done at the time.
Illustrators who produced watch advertisements rarely signed their work, but in the case of these Times Watch ads, the signature is visible: Kampmann.
Walter Kampmann was born in Germany in 1887. He studied at the Elberfeld School of Applied Art, where he became a teacher in 1913 [1].
He was mobilized during the First World War, and on his return in 1919, he taught at the Technical College for the Textile Industry in Berlin.
It was certainly his sensitivity to applied art that led him to produce posters and advertisements for Times Watch.
He is also a painter, engraver and sculptor. Few of his works have survived: considered "degenerate art" by the Nazis, many were destroyed in 1937.
Remobilized during the Second World War, he died in 1945.
2. Walter Kampmann and the Bahaus
Walter Kampmann took part in art groups such as the November Group, founded in 1919 and of which Kampman was a member in 1924 [2], or the Selection Group in 1932, which included such illustrious artists as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger. But he is not mentioned as a member of the Bahaus movement, created in 1919, when he designed the advertisements for Times Watch.
Yet it is to Bahaus that Kampmann's graphic work most closely relates. Probably because the Bahaus had a greater artistic unity than the more protean Groupe de Novembre.
A few comparisons will illustrate this point, comparing works by Bahaus members with works by Kampmann from the same period.
1923
1922
Oskar Schlemmer - 1922
1921
Laszlo Moholy Nagy - 1920
1920
1921
Lyonel Feininger - 1918
For Times Watch, the collaboration with Kampmann did not extend beyond 1922. From then on, the advertising used by the manufacturer was much more conventional.
1924
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kampmann
[2 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novembergruppe
©Time To Tell, 2025
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