Peter Haden - Almost Forgotten

32 For each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Haden designed a sculpture produced in bronze in an edition of 10 numbered casts. The sculptures ranged in size from 15 to 29 cm in height and bore no resemblance to the sculptures that Haden had produced in South Africa from 1965 to 1971. 1981 Atelier Kurt Meier, Basel, produced 23 colour lithographs as part of the Hebrew alphabet project. 1982 Galerie Patrick Cramer, Geneva, published ‘Elementary Knowledge – A Story of the Arabic Alphabet’. Haden produced 24 sculptures and over 100 drawings, exhibited from 22 April to 21 May. The exhibition was featured in the Visual Arts monthly Les Cimaises Romandes No 3, May 1982. 1985 Villa Bryn Bella ‘Musée de l’horlogerie et de l’émaillerie’, Geneva, exhibited 5 innovative sculptures (designed in 1983 and 1984) and presented a lecture titled: ‘Inedite de l’heure’ ( Profiles of Time, 14 February to 14 March). The curator of the exhibition, Fabienne Sturm, wrote: He has chosen to use sculpture as a way of fusing beauty and function by employing the intrinsically aesthetic quality of the art object as a messenger to carry human knowledge. In 1977, his work led him to the art of calligraphy and he subsequently made a series of bronze sculptures based on the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, expressing the full cultural wealth of these cultural civilisations. He has thus restored to the commonplace letter, or ‘character’, its historical and philosophical heritage as a symbol of man’s communication. At the same time, Peter Haden had the idea of making sculpture that measured time. His object was to give both sculpture and clock a new meaning by fusing the dyadic languages of time and art in a new and original way. The Horology and Enamel Museum of Geneva is pleased to present this ’new way of telling the time’, without a dial or hands, where the movement of the sculpture alone provides the essential guide to the minute and hour. The degree of innovation required to make the clocks is demonstrated in the technical information: The mechanical and quartz movements have been specially adapted to carry the parts of the sculpture which indicate the time. This adaptation is required because the weight of the sculpture is far greater than that of usual clock hands. The invention is patented. Each piece is made by hand. The editions are limited, numbered and signed by the artist. One of the sculptures from the exhibition, Sails of Time , was included in the publication Musée d’art et d’histoire Genéve (février – mai 1985, no 3). European Watch, Clock and Jewellery Fair, Basel, Antiquorum Auctioneers, an international firm specialising in rare and antique time-pieces, introduced Haden’s clock sculptures, 11 to 18 April 1985. Ancienne Collection, Geneva, donated a sculpture titled Pendule de table to the collection. 1995 World Athletics Championship in Gothenburg, president of the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF), Premio Nebiolo, donated The High-jumper (steel and aluminium, 2.3 x 1 m) to the Olympic Museum. The sculpture was shown at the exhibition ‘ The Many Faces of Athletics’ . 1996 World Economic Forum, Davos, exhibited The Athletes , 1 to 6 February: The essentials of a personal calligraphy are evident too in ‘The Athletes’, a sculpture which attempts to capture the spirit of movement using a non-racial, apolitical morphology’. 1997 Geneva Clock Museum, donated clock sculpture titled The Fisherman to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the museum. The clock featured on the front cover of ‘Swiss Style Lakeside’ , the largest English language circulation journal in Switzerland.