If you are a certain age and you put
on some vintage vinyl and close your
eyes to visualize the Sixties
it is highly likely that an image that will pop into your head like an acid flashback is a Peter Max poster with all of its vivid
colors, bold lines, celestial imagery, and general
wistfulness. Even if you know better,
you can’t help yourself. No artist of the era—not even the
relentlessly self-promoting Andy Warhol—was
more ubiquitous and iconic.
Yet despite enormous technical
mastery and inventiveness, Max is an artist many love to hate—even
when they can’t get his images out of their heads. Likely because he became a brand and an empire, supposedly whoring himself
to capitalism and advertising while also merchandising
his images in posters, books, coffee
mugs, clothing and textiles, wallpaper, and almost every conceivable
consumer product. In the process,
which continues to this day, Max may have become the richest artist who ever lived—a single-handed Wal-Mart colossus of
art.
That is so far in conflict
with the peace/love/joy message of
his Sixties work that it creates a kind of cognitive
dissonance that we can hardly deal with.
Peter
Max Finkelstein was born on October 19, 1937 to an
artistic and secular Jewish family
in Berlin, Germany. It was a notably inconvenient time
to be Jewish in Germany. When Peter was
less than a year old the family managed to flee the country, somehow
finding themselves in Shanghai,
China where they lived for the next ten years through the Japanese occupation and World War II.
The family seemed to live a charmed
life in a pagoda-style house
sandwiched in between Buddhist monastery
and a Sikh temple. On
the streets outside he could watch colorful Chinese New Year and other parades
with their dancing dragons and lions.
His mother, a former fashion
designer, littered the house with art supplies of all types and encouraged
her son to create whatever inspired him promising to clean up any mess he
made. Or so the story goes.
By the time the war ended and Peter
was old enough, he haunted the markets of the town for American comic books, listened to jazz on the radio, and took in the latest Hollywood
movies at a cinema operated by a
family friend.
In 1948 the family immigrated
to Israel where they settled in Haifa just in time for another
war. A war from which the family, once
again emerged unscathed. There he
took his first art lessons from an Austrian
expressionist, Professor Honik
who introduced the boy to Fauvism and the paintings and drawings of Henri Matisse, Maurice Vlaminck, Max
Beckmann, and Alexi Jawlensky. After visiting the observatory on Mt. Carmel,
Peter also took an interest in astronomy
and even enrolled in night classes to study the stars at Technion Institute
In the early Fifties the family moved again to Paris where they lived for nearly a year. The teenager was exposed to and fell
under the thrall of Classical and realist art he discovered at the Louvre.
He even enrolled in classes at the museum school.
But before he could settle down in France, the family migrated for a final
time to the Bensonhurst neighborhood
of Brooklyn, New York in
1953. There he enrolled at Lafayette High School. The bustling City of New York itself with its teeming streets, towering art deco skyscrapers, chic fashion, sleek automobiles, movie palaces, and art everywhere was
an even more important education.
After high school Peter began his formal
art education at the Art Students
League in Manhattan under the
tutelage of noted realist Frank
Reilly. He was exceptionally diligent
in mastering all the techniques of representational drawing
and painting. In addition to his lessons,
he spent hour every weekend in museums carefully studying the work and
technique of the masters.
Upon graduation Peter Finkelstein
was using the name Peter Max as he attempted to start a career as a fine artist. His devotion to realism and
representational art, however, made it difficult to make headway in the city
that was replacing Paris as the
center of the art world on the strength of the abstract expressionist and other non-representational forms of modern art.
He was struggling to find a gallery
that would even show his work until he had a chance encounter with an art director for a record company who commissioned him to create a cover for an album
by bluesman Meade Lux Lewis. The moody and evocative cover painting
ended up winning the annual Society of Illustrators
award.
Max had stumbled from the world fine
art to commercial art. He was soon very successful in his new
endeavor. In 1962, Max and Tom Daly started The Daly & Max Studio, a small commercial arts studio known and
were later joined by friend and mentor Don Rubbo. The trio collaborated on book design and advertising. They
specialized in a form of collage that blended vintage photographic images with painted elements. Awards
and commissions began to roll in as the three worked as a group on
books and advertising for which they received industry recognition.
By the mid-sixties in response to
the psychedelic movement, Max was
using kaleidoscopic techniques with
his collages and was adding bolder color. He also returned to his old interest in
astronomy and began to incorporate stars,
moons, and planets in his designs to lend them an other-worldly quality. This celestial
period is what Max is still best known for and which he continued to mine
well into the ‘70’s.
Advertisers loved it. Illustrations
for 7Up’s Un-cola campaign were a huge hit and
caused sales of the soft drink to jump
dramatically. Many others scrambled
to commission Max to work on their own campaigns. Max soon became aware that his commercial
images were being pinned to the walls of college
dormitories and hippy crash
pads. That led Max to designing decorative
posters for just that market.
Previously artists made fine art lithographic prints in limited
editions which were signed and numbered and sold at galleries
for hefty prices. Max did some of
that. But he was really intrigued by the
high quality that could be achieved on the new high speed four color web offset presses. He borrowed and a technique of using a split fountain that enabled him to blend colors as they were going through
the ink rollers that had been
pioneered in San Francisco Oracle and in West Coast concert posters.
He described the process of playing a printing press to playing electric piano.
Max’s posters registered with the zeitgeist. In 9 months of 1968 several million of his
posters were sold, mostly for less than $5 each. He became not only a celebrity, but a household name. That with his long black hair, drooping mustache, and colorful hippy
togs—shirts made from fabric
he designed he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, chatted with Johnny Carson on the Tonight
Show, and was featured in a cover story in Life magazine.
The counterculture was going mainstream fast. The success of the Peter Max brand led to
more and more advertising and merchandising deals. By 1970 Max licensed images to 72 corporations
from General Electric clocks to Burlington Mills socks. Within a three
year period, the line of products had generated more than $1 billion in retail
sales. And Max got a cut off the top
of each sale. No artist in history had
ever made money this fast or easily.
Max was so influential that he often
got credit for work he didn’t do.
Most people think he designed the images for The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine animated
film. Although the work was
obviously inspired by Max, the producers
always denied he was involved.
In recent years however, Max has told interviewers that he was close
friend with the Beatles, and they solicited him for ideas for the movie that
were used. But they wanted him to
personally do the animation, which would have required seventeen months of
continuous labor in Europe. Instead Heinz Edelmann, who advertised himself
as the German Peter Max, was
officially commissioned to do the design work.
Max designed the 10 cent U.S. Postage stamp honoring the 1974 Spokane World Fair.
He began painting portraits of American Presidents Gerald Ford, moving
to multiple images beginning with 100 Clintons. He most recently exhibited 44
Obamas. Later he celebrated pop
music super star Taylor Swift in a quartet of paintings
In 2007 Abrams Books published The World of Peter Max one of the
bestselling coffee table art books of
all time and in 2013 Harper Collins issued
Max’s memoirs, The Universe of Peter Max.
But Max’s recent years have also been clouded. In 1997,
he plead guilty in a Manhattan Federal court to charges of concealing more than $1.1 million in income from the Internal
Revenue Service in connection with the sales of his works between 1988 and 1991. The
plea came two days before he was to go on trial on an 11-count conspiracy and tax fraud
indictment. Under the deal, he plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the IRS and a charge of tax
evasion. In June
1998, he was sentenced to two
months in prison and a $30,000 fine. Ultimately
the judge ordered Max to pay the
taxes he owed and to perform 800
hours of community service and he avoided time behind bars.
More seriously, in the past decade Max has suffered increasingly disabling dementia. His
second wife Mary Marx, and environmental and animal
rights activist who he wed in 1997 during his legal
troubles and Adam Cosmo Max, his
son from a previous marriage, were engaged in lengthy
battles over his custody. Mary alleged that Adam tried to keep Peter
from his family and was involved in a scheme to peddle art allegedly created by
him but actually produced by a team of
others which was sold on a cruise line and in
galleries around the country, raking in millions of dollars.
In turn, Adam accused Mary of abuse, a charge she hotly denied. A court returned custody and guardianship to
Mary but litigation over his attributed work continued. In 2019 after a lengthy New York Times article on the family in-fighting, Mary committed suicide in her
New York apartment in June 2019. She
sent a lengthy voicemail to a
friend in London. “She wanted to leave a
message with certain instructions what to do with matters important to her and
she wanted to say her goodbyes” to her husband, her brother and mother, and
close friends according to her lawyer John Markham.
Max’s daughter Libra Astro Max is
currently working to revise guardianship issues for her father.
No matter what his mental
capacity, Peter Max remains rich. Very,
very rich.
No comments:
Post a Comment