Romero Britto

1999 and 2010: the festival posters

Every year the Montreux Jazz Festival entrusts its poster to an artist. Romero Britto has signed two, in 1999 and then in 2010 for the forty-fourth edition; he would draw a third in 2020, for the summer without a festival. That same year, 1999, he also created the logo of Montreux Sounds, Claude Nobs’s label.

The 2010 poster shows a boy playing the guitar, his dog sitting on a drum. Both official posters appear in the long poster gallery on the festival’s page.

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2006: the fortieth-anniversary sculpture

For the festival’s fortieth anniversary, Britto installed in the gardens of the Fairmont Le Montreux Palace an orange polka-dot steel heart set on a blue note, yellow plinth and handwritten line: “Montreux Jazz Festival, 40 years”. The work stands in the private part of the garden, a few metres from the statue of Claude Nobs and the jazz busts, and can be seen from the quays.

The Claude Nobs Foundation logo

After Claude Nobs’s death, it was Britto again who drew the logo of the Claude Nobs Foundation, which looks after the festival archives, inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. Back in 2010, he had already painted, right in the gardens of the Montreux Palace, an Alfa Romeo belonging to Claude Nobs and Thierry Amsallem (Claude Nobs Foundation ↗).

2020: “Silent Shores”, the summer without a festival

In 2020, the pandemic kept the festival from taking place. Rather than leave the summer empty, the Montreux Jazz Festival asked seventeen poster artists from its past editions to answer a single theme: “Silent Shores”. Britto was one of them: his poster stacks the mountains into coloured checkerboards, runs “Montreux” in large letters above the lake and scatters hearts scribbled with the word “jazz”. The drawings were printed in runs of a hundred, and the public was invited to design a poster of their own on the same theme (Montreux Jazz Festival ↗).