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

Peter Max, the artist whose rainbow posters and cosmic dreamscapes gave the 1960s counterculture its visual signature, died on Monday at 88. His son, Adam Max, confirmed the death in a written statement issued Wednesday. The statement did not give a cause.

We will remember his extraordinary creativity, his warmth, his curiosity, and the way he saw beauty and possibility everywhere.

Michael Pagnotta, a close friend and spokesperson who began working for Max in the mid-1980s, told Rolling Stone that the artist died at a Manhattan hospital after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. Best Classic Bands reported that the death came on September 14 and that Adam Max confirmed it to The New York Times on September 16. The Daily Beast reported that Max had been suffering from advanced dementia.

From Berlin to Shanghai to Brooklyn

He was born Peter Max Finkelstein in Berlin on October 19, 1937, to Jewish parents who fled Germany on the eve of World War II, according to Best Classic Bands. The family went to Shanghai, where Max spent the first 10 years of his life in a pagoda-style house near a Buddhist monastery, a Sikh temple and a Viennese cafe.

The family later spent time in Tibet, Israel and Paris before settling in New York City when Max was 16, The Associated Press reported. Rolling Stone's account places the family in Israel for several years and has them settling in Brooklyn in 1953. Best Classic Bands reported that the Paris stay lasted six months, during which Max took sketch classes at the Louvre.

After high school, Max studied at the Art Students League of New York, a traditional academy across from Carnegie Hall whose former students included Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. He also studied at the School of Visual Arts and at Pratt Institute.

In 1962 he opened a Manhattan design studio with a fellow art student, Tom Daly, and the bold style was an immediate hit with ad agencies, publications, the corporate world and in pop culture, the AP reported. Pagnotta told Rolling Stone that the Beatles supplied the soundtrack for that generation and that Max visualized it, and that the artist "exploded onto the scene in the late 1960s."

Love, rainbows and the Cosmic Jumper

Max's "Be In" poster layered the word Love over a rainbow background and, according to his website as cited by Rolling Stone, helped inspire "several hundred thousand hippies" to gather in New York City's Central Park for the Summer of Love. His "Cosmic Jumper," a weightless figure in a bell-bottomed suit soaring through dreamscapes of bright color, appeared on a 1974 postage stamp commemorating the Spokane World's Fair.

Dorm room walls were plastered with his posters, and household furnishings such as clocks and bedspreads carried his designs, the AP reported. Rolling Stone counted scarves, watches, butter dishes and bath towels among the goods his work was licensed for.

His art appeared on millions of posters and numerous magazine covers and was licensed for products ranging from shower curtains to planes and cruise ships, including a line of "art clocks" commissioned by General Electric, Agence France-Presse reported.

Max was often linked to the music of the Beatles, though he was not involved in the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, whose similar looking art came from the Czech-German illustrator Heinz Edelmann, Rolling Stone reported. He befriended the band after his own rise, according to The Daily Beast. "I see everything through rainbow eyes," Max once told ABC.

Border signs, stamps and stadium commissions

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

Commissions came from well outside the gallery world. Reuters listed the 1994 World Cup and five Super Bowls; Best Classic Bands added the 2000 World Series between the New York Yankees and the New York Mets. AFP added posters for the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

The Statue of Liberty, which he first painted in 1976 for the United States bicentennial, was among his most frequent subjects. His portraits also took in Presidents John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, the musicians Bono, Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra, Nelson Mandela, Disney characters and the Mona Lisa, according to Best Classic Bands. Rolling Stone added Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Taylor Swift. A retrospective of more than 300 works opened at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1991.

The New York Times described Max as "a vegetarian and a teetotaler who expanded his consciousness through yoga, not drugs," according to AFP. In his 2013 visual memoir, The Universe of Peter Max, he thanked the yoga master Swami Satchidananda, "who taught me the art of letting go and being in the flow." The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote the book's foreword, crediting Max with capturing "the soul of the cosmos on canvas."

A guilty plea in a 1997 tax case

Max pleaded guilty to tax fraud in 1997 after the Internal Revenue Service alleged he had concealed income from his art, the AP reported. He was originally sentenced to two months in prison, but was ultimately allowed 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. AFP put the concealed income at $714,000 from art sales between 1988 and 1991.

Peter Max's care became a court fight

Max's family life became tabloid fodder in 2015 in a back and forth between his second wife, Mary, and Adam, his son from a previous marriage, according to the AP. The son and a guardian alleged that Mary Max had depleted his finances and browbeat him. She in turn claimed that they had kept him from her against his will and had stolen paintings that belonged to her. Accounts of court appearances described him as frail.

Mary Max died by apparent suicide in 2019, weeks after a New York Times story about the artist's dementia and the handling of his work. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text. His daughter, Libra Max, spent recent years fighting to overturn the authority of a New York state court-appointed guardian, Barbara Lissner, whom she said was systematically draining her father's financial resources. Adam Max sided with Lissner, and a website called Free Peter Max was created in 2021 to press for an end to the guardianship.

Libra Max went public with the dispute before her father's death, accusing the guardian of isolating him from family and friends and withholding information about his health, Rolling Stone reported. Disputes over his treatment and the ownership of his art had been in and out of court for a decade, according to AFP.

Auctions at sea and later years

Onboard art auctions were a major source of income and of litigation, AFP reported. Max's work was sold at auctions on major cruise lines including Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian, and buyers later sued, saying the art they received did not meet their expectations.

He had long lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he could be seen walking the neighborhood, though he had not appeared in public for many years while suffering from advanced dementia, Best Classic Bands reported. Speaking to The New York Times in 2019, Max said he was "wowed by the universe."

I love color. I love painting. I love shapes. I love composition. I love the people all around me. I'm adoring it all. My legacy is in the hands of other people.

Max is survived by his children, Adam and Libra, Pagnotta told Rolling Stone, adding that they "loved him very much." The AP gave the daughter's full name as Libra Astro and reported that Max's first marriage, to Elizabeth Nance, ended in divorce.

Pagnotta described Max as having "a very expansive mind" and said the artist captured whatever postwar optimism existed in a turbulent country and married it to an eastern spiritual sensibility. He said Max believed in the mass appeal of what he was doing. "He believed in making art accessible to people," Pagnotta told Rolling Stone.