Peter Max, psychedelic pop artist of the 1960s, dies at 88

Peter Max, the pop artist whose rainbow-saturated posters gave the 1960s counterculture its look and whose designs were later licensed onto some 70 product lines, died on Monday at a Manhattan hospital at the age of 88.

His son, Adam Max, announced the death in a written statement on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press, which reported that no cause was given and that the artist had been suffering from advanced dementia. Michael Pagnotta, a spokesperson and friend who began working for Max in the mid-1980s, told Rolling Stone that he died after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

In the 2000s, his New York studio grew to more than 100 employees and generated annual sales of $80 million to $100 million, Reuters reported.

The business behind the posters

He licensed his work for some 70 products, Reuters reported, and the images ended up on airliners, cruise ships, bed sheets, eyeglasses, women's swimsuits and chess boards. He painted a Boeing 777 for Continental Airlines, a ship for Norwegian Cruise Line and a race car for the NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, and in 2000 he went on the cable shopping network QVC to sell his posters.

He was the official artist for five Super Bowls, the 1994 World Cup, the 2006 U.S. Winter Olympics team and the 2000 Kentucky Derby.

Agence France-Presse reported that he made posters for the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and General Electric commissioned a line of his art clocks in 1969. His art appeared on millions of posters, many of them the day-glow kind that hung in college dormitory rooms.

Art auctions aboard major cruise lines, among them Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian, became one of the largest sources of income for the operation and one of the largest sources of litigation. Buyers sued, saying the art they received did not meet their expectations.

From Berlin to New York

Max was born Peter Max Finkelstein in Berlin on Oct. 19, 1937, Reuters reported. His Jewish family fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai when he was a baby and later spent time in Tibet, Israel and Paris before settling in New York City when he was 16, according to the Associated Press.

By the time he arrived, he said in an interview, he was already a fan of American comics, movies and jazz music. He studied at the Art Students League, the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute, and in 1962 he opened a Manhattan design studio with a fellow art student, Tom Daly, whose work was an immediate hit with ad agencies and the corporate world. Max was on the cover of Life magazine in 1969.

His poster known as Be In layered the word Love over a rainbow background and helped inspire several hundred thousand hippies to gather in Central Park during the Summer of Love, according to an account on his own website cited by Rolling Stone. The weightless, bell-bottomed figure he called the Cosmic Jumper appeared on a 1974 postage stamp commemorating the Spokane World's Fair.

In the 1970s the federal government hired Max to design a series of Welcome to the U.S. signs for entry points along the Canadian and Mexican borders. The designs, drenched in bright pink, blue and yellow, went into storage after some officials questioned their psychedelic look. President Jimmy Carter revived the project, and the signs were installed at about 160 ports of entry in 1978.

The sell-out question

To those who said he was a sell-out, Max answered that he was simply finding outlets for his artistic zeal, Reuters reported. He told The New York Times that if Matisse and Picasso were still around, they too would be trying to rush the market. A 1967 critique in the Village Voice had called his decorative posters the work of a visionary fascinated by time, space and evolution.

The scale of that licensing explosion was monumental, he said in 2007, and it was more than he could ever have gotten from galleries alone.

The myth that an artist is not pure if he makes money is the wrong myth... What have I got to apologize for? I make art people can afford. And that makes them happy.

What bothered him about the success, he said, was that he was not painting anymore, and in the early 1970s he shut the business down for a time to reconnect with his art, the Associated Press reported. Among his biggest projects after that break was a series of Statue of Liberty portraits painted at the White House in 1981 at the invitation of the first lady, Nancy Reagan.

Comeback and presidential portraits

He came back with a New York gallery show in 1987 and again became a marketing machine, working in a style that had turned more impressionistic, Reuters reported. His later subjects included a 40-part series on the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton, who had told him that Max posters hung in his college dormitory. Ronald Reagan was a fan, and Max gave a Statue of Liberty painting to the Reagan Presidential Library.

Court fights over his work

He pleaded guilty to tax fraud in 1997 after the Internal Revenue Service alleged that he had concealed more than $1 million in income from his art, the Associated Press reported. He was originally sentenced to two months in prison, but was allowed instead to serve the time in a work-release program, pay the back taxes and a $30,000 fine, and perform 800 hours of community service teaching art in Harlem schools.

In 2015, his family life became tabloid material in a back-and-forth between his second wife, Mary Max, and Adam, his son from a previous marriage.

The son and a guardian alleged that Mary Max had depleted the artist's finances and browbeat him; she said the two had kept him from her against his will and had stolen paintings that belonged to her. Accounts of his court appearances described him as frail. Mary Max died by apparent suicide in 2019, two weeks after The New York Times published a story detailing the legal battles over his work. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text.

Dementia and a guardianship dispute

The Times reported in May 2019 that Max had been diagnosed with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and had advanced dementia, and that he had not painted seriously in four years, according to Reuters. Before his death, his daughter, Libra, went public with a legal dispute with his court-appointed guardian, whom she accused of isolating her father from family and friends and withholding information about his health, Rolling Stone reported.

I hope that alongside his remarkable artistic legacy, people will remember his kindness, his gentleness, and how much he genuinely cherished putting joy into the world.

In the statement announcing the death, Adam Max said the family would remember his father's creativity, his warmth and his curiosity, and the way he saw beauty and possibility everywhere. Pagnotta told Rolling Stone that Max believed in the mass appeal of what he was doing and in making art accessible to people.

Accounts of Max's career sometimes lament that the art establishment did not take him seriously; his work has been featured in dozens of museum exhibitions around the world, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York owns seven of his works, the Associated Press reported. The art for the Beatles' Yellow Submarine is sometimes attributed to him, though the album cover and film designs are officially credited to the late Heinz Edelmann.

The Times described him as a vegetarian and a teetotaler who expanded his consciousness through yoga rather than drugs, Agence France-Presse reported. Speaking to the paper in 2019, Max said he was wowed by the universe, and that his legacy was in the hands of other people.