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When It Comes to Licensing, Some Artists Cash in While Others Push Back

What began as a niche market for museum gift shop staples has grown into a multi-billion-dollar global industry that puts famous-name artwork on everything from swimsuits to skateboards.

Can you tell the time on that Swatch watch, or does the look of splattered paint on the dial and wristband make the time hard to see—or perhaps irrelevant? Swatch, which for 40 years has produced limited-edition lines of watches with designs by such artists as Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Sam Francis, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Piet Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein and quite a few others, has recently released two new ones: a Jackson Pollock featuring his 1947 painting Alchemy and a Paul Klee edition with a portion of his 1919 The Bavarian Don Giovanni. (Both works are part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim.) As wristwatches go, the Pollock ($115) and Klee ($105) are priced between a Timex and a Citizen—expensive for your 12-year-old’s first timepiece but the right sort of novelty gift for an art-enthusiast boyfriend on your second anniversary.

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Perhaps the greatest novelty of all is finding so many mostly well-known images by mostly well-known artists on a growing number of products. Swatch has worked with several museums in the U.S. and Europe, according to Carlo Giordanetti, a member of the Swatch Design Committee and chief executive officer of the Swatch Art Palace in Shanghai. These include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre in Paris, Tate and Tate Modern in the U.K. as well as MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York City. Additionally, he told Observer, “Swatch Art Journey Collections are also sold in the museum shops of the institutions involved in each collaboration.” He added that the brand has also licensed images from living artists such as Kenny Scharf and Joana Vasconcelos.

Swatch isn’t the only company producing wristwatches with notable art images on their dials. Musart has its own collection, with licensed designs by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Andy Warhol. Another company, WatchCraft, has artistic images on a series of its watches, although none of them appear to be based on artwork by well-known artists, including its Gaudi Three-Tone-Wide, which is unrelated to the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí.

Licensing of art images for one product or another has been on an upward trajectory for years, and it is difficult to find a big-name artist of the present or past who has not been swept up in it. In recent weeks, the Amsterdam-based clothing brand Scotch & Soda released a collection of apparel items said to be “inspired” by the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, including a striped long-sleeve t-shirt priced at roughly the same as the Pollock Swatch. A few years back, the Metropolitan Museum of Art partnered with PacSun in a deal that, according to Martin Cribbs, vice president of brand management at the brand extension licensing firm Beanstalk, “blew the doors open” to Millennial and Gen........

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