Peter Max, the iconic counterculture artist of the 1960s and 70s, died Monday in a Manhattan hospital at ag 88. Wife Amy and I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with him at a gallery opening in Northern Virginia while we lived in the Washington area for 23 years.
Max, with his trademark mustache, was an energetic conversationalist while we talked about how he abandoned an earlier interest in astronomy to became a successful pop artist whose joyful and positive art became a cultural and commercial success.
“I tried to visualize a world where people were happy and wanted to learn,” he told us. “That made some critics mad but it doesn’t faze me.”
We bought a poster. It hangs in our house.
In a memoir, “The Universe of Peter Max,” he wrote:
My cosmic art subjects were always euphoric: Himalayan sages levitating under a shower of flowers beside snowcapped mountain peaks; faces and flowers exploding into a symmetrical cosmic butterfly; mirrored lakes and waters with a cascade of stars and planets; flowers in perpetual states of organic growth, begetting blossoms. My inspiration came from the new youth movement in America and in return spoke to it.
He was born Peter Max Finkelstein on Oct. 19, 1937, in Berlin. They fled Germany as the Nazi terror rose, his family relocated to Shanghai, then to Israel where where Peter learned Hebrew and, infatuated with the stars and planets, took special courses in astronomy at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology.
In an obituary in Wednesday’s New York Times:
In 1953, the family emigrated to New York, settling in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where Peter attended Lafayette High School. He had taken private art lessons in Israel, and, at the urging of a classmate, signed up for summer classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan after high-school graduation. Abandoning his rather vague plan to pursue astronomy as a career, he threw himself into art.
Initially he painted as a realist, then dabbled in abstraction and finally concentrated on commercial art. Riverside Records gave him his first assignment, to design the LP sleeve for “The Blues Piano Artistry of Meade Lux Lewis,” released in 1962. His moody, vaporous portrait of Mr. Lewis at the piano won a gold medal at the annual exhibition of the Society of Illustrators.
With Tom Daly, he formed a design company that quickly found favor with advertising agencies and book publishers. Within two years, Daly & Max Studio had collected more than 60 awards for its book jackets, album covers and other work, but Mr. Max, feeling constrained, left in 1965. For two years, he lived in virtual seclusion in his duplex apartment on Riverside Drive, turning out thousands of drawing and ideas.
In 1967, he applied some of his new concepts to the Tin Lizzie in midtown, a theme restaurant that he decorated with paisley wallpaper, photographic collages of Charlie Chaplin film scenes and an actual Model T Ford.
His advertising posters for local shops began to attract special attention. Young customers called up the job printer, Security Printing Company, asking for a poster to hang in their rooms. Denton Stein, the company’s owner, went into partnership with Mr. Max to create Peter Max Posters, which sold 25 of the artist’s designs, in millions of copies, to book stores, head shops and department stores.
As his popularity grew, Mr. Max began doing commercial posters for the American Cancer Society, the Peace Corps and the United Nations. The 3,000 posters and 40,000 fliers he printed for a gathering in Central Park on Easter 1967 inadvertently gave the event its name. The words “Be In,” in large letters, followed by “Central Park on March 31,” were read as a noun, not a verb in the imperative mood.
In 1968, a transit advertising company commissioned Mr. Max to design posters for buses, streetcars and subways in 10 major cities. “I am bringing art to the people where the people are,” he told Time magazine. “Now they don’t have to go to galleries and see paintings on a wall.”
General Electric approached him to design a clock. He followed up with a line of linens for J.P. Stevens and shirts for Van Heusen. Through the half dozen businesses bearing his name, he entered into licensing agreements with more than 70 companies.
“You provide the cash, the production and the selling,” he told Business Week in 1968. “I’ll furnish the ideas and the designs — and we’ll split the profits 50-50.” When Life magazine put Mr. Max on its cover in 1969, the headline read “Peter Max: Portrait of the Artist as a Very Rich Man.”
Max closed down his studio in the 1970s, saying he was “in a rut” and went into seclusion but later emerged with new ideas and optimism. It during that period when we met him at the gallery in Fairfax. He was energetic and appeared happy.
Later, in after the turn of the century, signs of dementia began to appear and increased until his son, Adam Max, announced his father’s death.
In 2007, Max told Crain’s New York Business: “Just as The Beatles had the music, I had the images,” Kids would buy the posters and look at them as they listened to the music. It was like their MTV.”