Timeless Beauty

Elegance, style: Jackie Kennedy Onassis wearing a Cartier Tank, 1969; Warren Beatty, 1967., From Hulton Archives/Getty Images (Onassis); courtesy of Cartier (watch); by Jack Robinson/Condé Nast Archives (Beatty); by Jack Nisberg/Roger-Viollet (Ranier).
The iconic Cartier Tank fuses practicality and aesthetics.

In the beginning it didn’t have a name. It was simply the answer to a practical question: How will men who need both hands free tell time? It was, as well, the answer to an aesthetic question: How do you make a wristwatch that isn’t just a small pocket watch on a strap?

At first glance, these questions might seem trivial. But as the 19th century turned into the 20th, bringing telephones, automobiles, and airplanes into human life (in other words: connection, speed), and also bringing horror (world war), time changed forever. It came out of the vest pocket and off the fob, and was buckled just above the hand that steered the wheel and flew the plane. The man who put it there—squarely, incomparably—was Louis Cartier. Placed without ceremony into the windows of Cartier’s Paris salon in 1919—90 years ago—this wristwatch instantly took its place in history as an icon, a symbol, and a standard for modern design. Within months it had a name: the Tank. And within a decade it was the watch of choice for the most singular people in the world, first-namers who would include Greta, Cary, Jackie, Truman, Andy, Diana, and, most recently, Michelle.

Technically, the Tank wasn’t the first documented wristwatch (that honor goes, in uncertain order, to the Swiss companies Patek Philippe and Girard-Perregaux). And it wasn’t even Cartier’s first wristwatch. That would be the Santos. Created in 1904 for Alberto Santos-Dumont, a wealthy flier and dandy, this watch was powerful, masculine, with screws spaced like rivets around the bezel. The Tank, however, was the first wristwatch to solve the problem that consumed Cartier: how to attach a face to a band with complete conceptual integrity. In fact, Cartier was alone in thinking that this was a problem.

“Watchmakers were not really concerned with style,” explains Sam Hines, vice president and head of the watch department at Christie’s in New York. “Yes, you did get many beautifully designed pocket watches, but the pocket watch is kept in the pocket. Their concerns were: How is the watch running? How is it performing in this test or that exhibition? Cartier, being a jeweler, had an advantage because he was concerned with the design, how it would look on one’s wrist.”

Another advantage: Louis Cartier was unafraid of the future. While the name Cartier was to Paris as Fabergé was to St. Petersburg (the two houses shared some of the same suppliers), Fabergé was known for ancien curves and elaborate chase work, where Cartier favored clean geometries and rectilinear restraint. (“The French don’t so much go for circles,” notes the style writer Holly Brubach.) Fabergé, despite its renowned imperial eggs, was not hatching any new ideas. But in Cartier’s workrooms it was full speed ahead.

“You have to remember,” says Pierre Rainero, Cartier International’s director of image, style, and heritage, “that it was the period of Art Nouveau. And Louis Cartier was totally against Art Nouveau. Totally against! Because he thought it was a dead-end street for style. No evolution. And at Cartier everything we do in terms of design should be an open door to other possibilities.”

As early as 1905, in advance of Art Deco, Cartier was already making abstract jewelry, according to Rainero, “with volumes, shapes, and colors just for the pleasure of assembling volumes, shapes, and colors. And not in a figurative way.” As artistic movements such as Cubism, Bauhaus, futurism, and de Stijl caught fire in the teens, introducing grid-like structures that suggested perception unadorned or perception multiplied, Cartier, with the lightest touch, brought abstraction to bear on his “problem.” Deep in the Tank’s design were the dynamics of modernism’s beginnings—the grids, the war, the ideas of “less is more” and “form follows function.” With the prototype of 1917, Louis Cartier produced a solution that has never been bettered.

One could call Cartier’s new wristwatch “son of Santos,” for the Tank is nascent in the Santos design, which has a face that’s almost square and brancards that hug the band. Yet the Santos still has curves—baby bumps, let’s say, at each corner. It still has the same relationship to its band that a circular face might have. But the first Tank! Unbending. Unblinking. Unapologetically industrial and undecorated. Curves have been banished; its face is a perfect square. The band is the exact same width as the face, its points of attachment (the lugs) hidden, because all elements are held in suspension between the two parallel brancards, which have the linear reach of a rectangle, continuing well beyond 12 and 6.

“When you see a Santos and a Tank,” says Rainero, “you see that the Tank is an incredible progress, in terms of purity of design. Because there’s not that curve anymore. It’s just straight bars. It’s such a simple idea, but so bright and so obvious when you see the object.”

This object was named not for a man but for a machine, and not officially until sometime after it had appeared in the store, in November 1919. It was not sold as a “Tank” watch, says Rainero, “which would have been perceived as very provocative. The customer would come to Cartier and would buy the rectangular watch, and that was it. [But] it was our internal vocabulary, yes. Because every time we design an object, we name it. Nobody knows who starts the name. It can be a designer; it can be a worker—an allusion to, or a comparison made.”

Lore has it that Louis Cartier was directly influenced by the new machine of the Great War, and it’s true that France’s zippy little two-man Renault FT-17 light tank was first delivered in March 1917. The watch’s brancards are remarkably like the parallel treads of a tank. But historians remain unconvinced. Franco Cologni, author of the stunningly erudite book Cartier: The Tank Watch, has said, “That’s a legend. The Tank followed the design of the Santos watch—it was an evolution of style. But Louis Cartier was not a stupid man. He was a salesman, a P.R. man &hellip; so he said it was copied from the tank.” Cartier further nailed the point by giving the prototype to America’s General Pershing. Thus the equation was made: Cartier Tank as Zeitgeist machine. Or, as Cologni put it, “the first elegant wristwatch destined for the modern man of action.”

Prince Rainier III and Grace Kelly in Paris, in front of the Cartier boutique on the Rue de la Paix.

In 1919, a mere six Tank watches were made. In the following year, 33. Over the next 50 years, 5,829 Tanks were produced. (Until the 60s, most years saw fewer than 100 new Tanks.) The Tanks were made in golds (yellow, white, pink) or platinum or both, and the brancards were sometimes enameled or bejeweled. The first Tank, the design that set the standard, was called Tank Normale. Soon after, Cartier began introducing variations on his iconic theme—stretching, softening, narrowing, twirling, playing, but always within the bracing paradigm of those parallel brancards. Some of the more than 250 re-interpretations that followed could be a vocabulary of la danse: Chinoise, Allongée, Cintrée, Basculante, Asymétrique. Louis Cartier’s magnificent little Machine Age, Art Deco grid gave him infinite room to move.

This year, Cartier is celebrating its 100-year anniversary in America. The Tank is still a top seller, still integral to the company’s image. “When you talk about Cartier,” says Rainero, “people spontaneously think of sumptuous jewelry. The Tank shows that we are also preoccupied by essential design.” The most recent Tank model is the Tank Française, first produced in 1996 and distinguished by jazzy bevels at the ends of each brancard. It is currently Cartier’s best-selling Tank.

For collectors, the Tanks that heat up the auction houses are the early ones, especially the Normale. “A platinum top with a pink-gold back,” says Daryn Schniper, Sotheby’s worldwide head of watches. “Because of the rarity and the ultimate chicness of it. It gives you the whole Cartier mystique. Of course, should Tanks arrive where there’s some enamel, the 30s &hellip; anything that’s a little bit different.”

Sam Hines, of Christie’s, cites the Tank Cintrée. “In platinum,” he says. “It’s like the Tank Normale, but the Cintrée is larger, and it’s curved so that it bends around the wrist. You never ever come across these watches. I’ve seen one in 10 years. It can easily make in excess of $50,000.” As for the most beautiful Tank design to grace his desk, Hines answers, “There was a Tank Normale from 1928. When you wound the watch, the power and ticking you could feel going into the movement, it made me think of a sports car of the time.”

“There’s nothing superfluous in the design,” says Holly Brubach. “I think of the Tank watch as being so quintessentially French. It’s hard to imagine it could have been designed in any other country.” Which is probably why it’s been worn by so many couturiers, among them Pierre Balmain, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, and Yves Saint Laurent.

It’s quintessentially androgynous, too. From the start, the Tank was referred to as “la Tank,” because in French the word for “watch” is feminine. Moreover, Tanks have always been produced in models for women—yet another way Cartier was reaching into the future. Jackie Kennedy Onassis wore her Tank with turtlenecks. The late Princess Diana’s, a gift from her father, the Eighth Earl Spencer, is now a treasured possession of her elder son, Prince William. And for Michelle Obama’s White House portrait she wore a stainless-steel Tank Française on her long, strong, sleeveless arm. Look closely. That square watch face continues to say exactly what Louis Cartier meant it to: “Now.”

Laura Jacobs is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.