Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Nicolas Descharnes and the late Robert Descharnes.

Provenance
John Peter Moore Collection, Cadaqués (probably acquired directly from the artist).
Anon. sale, Galerie Pierre-Yves Gabus, Geneva, 23 June 1991, lot 494.
Private collection, Switzerland (acquired at the above sale).
Private collection, Switzerland (by descent from the above).


By 1969, Salvador Dalí - ever the provocateur and master of reinvention - had turned his attention toward the burgeoning field of record design, creating Motif pour une veste-disque as a maquette for an album cover for the Haitian jazz singer Jho Archer. Combining collage, gouache, metallic paint, and ink, Dalí assembled a dreamlike composition: Archer's own smiling mouth appears twice, cut from a photograph, set amid butterflies, lilies that bloom into gramophone horns, and a rainbow flame surging from a vintage television screen. A red two-pronged crutch - one of Dalí's most iconic symbols - props up the assemblage, while a green-toned landscape flickers across the TV, fusing the ephemeral medium of popular culture with the timeless Surrealist vocabulary he had honed over decades. The work thereby transforms sound into image, giving visual form to Archer's vibrant and eclectic music.

Dalí's collaboration with Archer represents a fascinating convergence of two polymathic spirits: the Catalan Surrealist whose practice spanned painting, sculpture, film, theatre and fashion, and the Haitian singer-dancer who brought jazz into dialogue with the ritual rhythms of voodoo and Creole folk traditions. Archer's 1968 album, The Many Talents of Jho Archer, had already established him as an innovator on the international stage, with Dalí's design situating him within a lineage of Surrealist experimentation that reached far beyond the gallery wall. Dalí had previously lent his imagery to Jackie Gleason's Lonesome Echo (1955) and returned to the medium several more times during his career, with each project seizing on the album cover as a stage for theatre, fantasy, and spectacle. Motif pour une veste-disque thus embodies Dalí's restless appetite for new forms of expression, while crystallising a rare collaboration with an artist whose own work bridged continents and traditions. Today, it stands not only as a compelling artefact of Dalí's forays into music and design but as a vivid testament to his enduring ability to transform even the most commercial of formats into Surrealist art.