When you’ve had artists like Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Julien Opie, Shigeo Fukuda, John Armleder, and Niki de Saint Phalle designing your posters, you are inclined to continue to seek out the most creative artists of your time. For Mathieu Jaton, CEO of the Montreux Jazz Festival, having Banksy create the poster for the 51st edition would be a dream come true.“I would love to have street artists working with us,” he tells Artinfo in an interview, “it’s something we haven’t done yet. We’ve worked with many contemporary artists, but now I really would like to go a bit more underground, toward the street generation, maybe graffiti too; but Banksy would really be a coup!”Collaborations between the festival and visual artists started early on, and while posters created by Eric Wondergem, Hamish Grimes, and Bruno Gaeng were primarily intended to publicize the line-up of the festival, their design moved in a different gear when Claude Nobs, the festival’s visionary creator, asked Pierre Keller, the director of the Lausanne University of Art and Design, to select the artists, giving them the freedom to create posters that would represent their own vision of the festival.The first of these new commissions, in 1982, was to Jean Tinguely, who created a new logo for the Montreux Jazz Festival, which remains in use to this day. In 1983, Keller commissioned rising American artist Keith Haring to design three posters — Haring also performed on stage that year. A couple of years later, Keller was visiting Haring’s studio in New York when Andy Warhol dropped by unexpectedly, a serendipitous meeting that led to a joint collaboration with Haring for the 1986 design.Jaton points out each poster has an extremely important double role for the festival: beyond defining the identity of the festival for that year, it is also incorporated into all the merchandising, from T-shirts to umbrellas, phone cases, and coffee mugs, and these generate vital revenue for the festival (about $1million a year).“For us, it’s really not about communicating the date of the festival, it’s about communicating the identity of the event that year,” he says.Giving carte blanche to an artist does come with a certain amount of risk though. Jaton notes, “we really don’t control the image — sometimes the artist will give us a choice, sometimes not — but we have to respect [the artist’s] vision.” The 2012 poster by photographer Greg Gorman portraying a naked Adonis walking on a beach puzzled many, and surprised Jaton: “We’d seen the incredible photographs he had done of David Bowie and other [performance] artists, visceral shouting faces, and we kind of thought he would do something along those lines; I could already see the poster. But he went for something completely different, and yes, it was a bit surprising. That said we’d already had a naked woman viewed from the back on our poster back in 1969, and in the end we have to assume the principle of the carte blanche, because the only restriction we give the artist is ‘no political or religious message,’ and that’s really the only thing. In the end, that image brought the festival incredible publicity!”Sadly not many of the original artworks have been kept by the festival. “I know it’s very surprising given how much Claude was collecting himself, but many of the artworks were kept by the people that were there at the time. The festival did not take ownership of the works. I wish they had. The first 35 years were unique pieces; since 2000‑2005, it was more digitalized, but since 2013, I’m now asking again for an official artwork.” Jaton says.The festival is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, and for this milestone event’s poster, Jaton moved away from the usual commission and choose a proposal submitted by a local designer Giovanni Riva. Using a midnight blue background grooved like a vinyl record, Riva incorporated the logo first created by Tinguely, recreating it in a collage of fragments from the 49 previous posters, set out in chronological order. Beyond the historic nod to all the earlier collaborations, the design also symbolizes the mixing of music genres that have made the name of the festival.“I didn’t want one artist to sign on the 50th year,” explains Janton, “I felt that poster needed to live by itself and should represent 50 years of music in Montreux and not an interpretation of one artist. We mulled different concepts but then Giovanni made his pitch; I immediately thought it was the simplest idea I’d heard, but was also the best. In fact, in terms of merchandising it has already proven to be our best seller ever!”Looking ahead, the festival has just collaborated with Yamamoto for the poster of the Montreux Jazz Festival Japan, coming up in early October. Janton says, “Claude would have loved it, because Yamamoto was his favorite designer and every time he was heading to Tokyo he would ransack the Yamamoto boutique.”Asked who else he would have on his wish list, Jaton says he would love to work with Ian Shepley, photographer JR, or Takashi Murakami.
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