Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) never came to Montreux: his name is on the festival’s twentieth-anniversary poster, drawn long-distance with Keith Haring in 1986. Warned that the artwork was not ready the night before his flight back from New York, Pierre Keller pushed Haring to invent a fix: musical staves, drawn by Warhol, threaded between Haring’s own dancing figures. Claude Nobs, then turning fifty, inherited a red-and-yellow poster printed in Switzerland and shipped in stages to the shore of Lake Geneva. Warhol died seven months later, in February 1987: one of his very last printed collaborations bears the name of the Montreux Jazz Festival.

1986: a poster signed without ever coming

The missed rendez-vous

Andy Warhol grew up in Pittsburgh, where he was born on 6 August 1928 under the name Andrew Warhola. After studying design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he moved to New York and became, from the 1960s onward, the central figure of American pop art: the Campbell’s soup cans, exhibited in 1962, made him an icon before he had even turned thirty-five.

Twenty-four years later, it was from his New York studio, without ever crossing the Atlantic, that he entered the visual history of the Montreux festival. The idea came from Pierre Keller, the festival’s artistic adviser and already responsible for bringing Keith Haring to Montreux in 1983. For the event’s twentieth anniversary in 1986, Keller wanted to bring together two icons of the New York scene. But the project dragged on: the night before his return to Switzerland, the artwork still was not ready. It was in this rush that Haring came up with the idea that unlocked the collaboration.

Staves and dancing figures

Haring suggested that Warhol draw musical staves — parallel lines evoking a score — and placed his own dancing figures on them, like so many notes. The two men chose red and yellow; Pierre Keller would later see a mischievous wink in it: “It’s very Swiss, it will remind people of Maggi seasoning.”

The poster was printed in Switzerland, by screenprint, at the Albin Uldry workshop in Hinterkappelen, near Bern — a hundred by seventy centimetres, one of the few materially Swiss steps in the whole project. The lettering and the two signatures followed separately, by UPS, several days after Keller’s return to Montreux. It served both the twentieth Montreux Jazz Festival and the seventh Montreux-Detroit Jazz Festival, and was unveiled in New York in March 1986, Haring and Warhol side by side.

The last signature

Warhol died on 22 February 1987, in New York, after a gallbladder operation billed as routine that went wrong. He was fifty-eight.

The Montreux poster, designed barely a year earlier, thus counts among his very last printed collaborations — one of the last documents to still show, side by side, the two artists who had dominated New York pop art twenty years apart. It is today part of the gallery the Montreux Jazz Festival keeps of every edition — the only physical trace, on the Riviera, of Andy Warhol’s passage, though he never once set foot there.