NEW YORK — Peter Max, whose trippy posters of Day-Glo flowers, butterflies, rainbows, stars and planets sold by the millions and expressed the blissed-out exuberance of the countercultural 1960s, died Monday in New York City. He was 88.
The death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Adam Max. He had long suffered from dementia.
Mr. Max, a vegetarian and a teetotaler who expanded his consciousness through yoga, not drugs, was one of the most visible and successful artists of his time, selling posters in the millions.
His simple graphic images, brightly colored and infectiously happy, lent themselves to a long list of licensed commercial products, from sheets and glassware and shower curtains to airplanes and, on one occasion, a stamp for the Postal Service.
Incorporating art nouveau, op art and psychedelic motifs, Mr. Max’s designs offered instant visual gratification and a cheery endorsement of the generational politics of love, joy and universal consciousness. His “panopticon” images repeated visual elements in tight formation, producing a kaleidoscope effect that recalled Easter mandalas.
His “cosmic jumper,” a young man in bell bottoms traversing the globe in giant strides, became an emblem of modern youth, eager to explore the far reaches of inner and outer space. Barefoot and surrounded by puffy clouds and chubby birds, the jumper appeared on the 10-cent stamp commissioned for Expo ’74, the conservation-themed World’s Fair in Seattle.
In The Universe of Peter Max, a memoir published in 2013, 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.”
Peter Max Finkelstein was born Oct. 19, 1937, in Berlin, where his father, Jakob, was in the import-export business and his mother, Salla (Zeisel) Finkelstein, had been a fashion designer before her marriage. With the rise of Nazism, the family moved to Shanghai, where Jakob set up as a pearl merchant. Peter attended an English-language school and spent much of his spare time talking to monks at the nearby Buddhist monastery.
As the Maoist revolution gathered strength, the Finkelsteins moved again, this time to Haifa, in Israel, 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 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 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 Manhattan, 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 flyers 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.”
Mr. Max was everywhere. He was not, however, involved with the 1969 Beatles film Yellow Submarine, often assumed to be his work, in part because he often took credit for it. The film’s art director was Heinz Edelmann, sometimes called the German Peter Max.
By the 1970s, Mr. Max was in a rut. He shut down his studio and again went into seclusion. “I stopped cold,” he told People magazine in 1976. “I was repeating myself creatively. I had filled myself with being everywhere, doing everything. I had had it.”
Gradually, he reemerged. For the American Bicentennial, he accepted a commission from the Swedish company ASEA to produce the book Peter Max Paints America, a collection of paintings and drawings honoring each of the 50 states.
That same year, he produced a series of bilingual “Welcome to the United States” signs posted at more than 200 crossings along the Canadian and Mexican borders. Initially rejected by the Customs Service as implicitly endorsing the ’60s drug culture, they were finally put up in 1978.
He designed the logo for MTV in the 1980s and the official poster for soccer’s World Cup in 1994. In 1999 he decorated a Boeing 777 for Continental Airlines to commemorate NYC 2000, the official millennium celebration in New York. In 2015, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame commissioned him to do a poster for its annual induction ceremony.
By then, he was already struggling with dementia. Yet the Peter Max brand flourished, boosted by the artist’s relationship with Park West Galleries, a Michigan-based company that sold Mr. Max’s work at cruise-ship auctions. Sales on a single voyage could reach $2 million, and in 2018, Mr. Max’s studio, ALP Inc. — named for its three owners, Peter Max and his two children, Adam and Libra — recorded a profit of more than $30 million.
The artist’s production methods became the subject of widespread speculation. Friends reported that Mr. Max could no longer paint and merely signed his work, which was made, in prodigious quantities, by a small army of assistants.
They were overseen by Adam Max, who was ousted from his father’s business in 2019 by his daughter, Libra Max, and the artist’s court-appointed guardian, who were concerned that Mr. Max was being exploited. Libra Max took over her father’s studio, fired many of his assistants and business associates, and set about restoring his reputation through galley and museum shows that showcased his earlier work.
Mr. Max’s first marriage, to Elizabeth Nance, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce. In 1997, he married Mary Balkin, who was 30 years his junior and whom he randomly met on a Manhattan sidewalk a year earlier. “Hi, I’m Peter Max, and I’ve been painting your profile my entire life,” he reportedly said upon first seeing her.
She died by apparent suicide in 2019, amid her husband’s worsening dementia and an extended legal dispute with her stepson over the handling of Peter Max’s art and wealth.
Mr. Max is survived by Adam and Libra Max.
For his legions of fans, Mr. Max would always remain an avatar of the 1960s counterculture in its happiest, most innocent phase. Whatever the year, and whatever the occasion, his work always breathed the spirit of the 1960s. When the De Young Museum in San Francisco organized an exhibition in 2007, the title said it all: “Peter Max and the Summer of Love.”
“Just as The Beatles had the music, I had the images,” he told Crain’s New York Business in 2007. “Kids would buy the posters and look at them as they listened to the music. It was like their MTV.”
