Peter Max
(1937 - )
He was born in Berlin, Germany and raised in Shanghai, China and in Israel before his family settled in the United States in 1953. Max trained in New York the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and the School of Visual Arts. After completing his studies, Max opened a design studio and gained success as a designer for books, posters and products. Max closed his studio in 1964 and began making his signature colorful silkscreens.
Max's art work was influential and much imitated in advertising design in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Max
"Artist Peter Max's world still as colorful as his '60s palette"
By Barbara Karkabi
Artist Peter Max is a work in constant motion, as colorful in his own way as the wild, almost dreamlike images he created in the psychedelic '60s and early '70s.
A conversation with the charming artist is intense and fast-paced, jumping from his childhood in Shanghai to life in Manhattan, from his work in the '60s to the new millennium.
Max can never do just one thing at a time, he says, fishing out a stack of 3-by-3-inch cards upon which he draws with a black marker almost constantly -- a sophisticated form of doodling.
"My passion is my art," Max says. "I draw all day long. It's not my stress relief; it's just my passion -- making art and inventing things. I love inventing things."
Max also is an eternal optimist who enjoys people, a trait obvious during the weekend opening of more than 100 pieces of his colorful work at Off the Wall Gallery in Galleria II, where he discussed his art with enthusiastic fans. All month, the gallery will exhibit a range of original paintings, graphics and autographed posters, from his '60s period as well as his latest work from the '80s and '90s. The works range in value from $970 to almost $60,000.
To anyone under 30, the question is likely to be, "Max who?" But to aging hippies trying to survive in the '90s, the name evokes colorful, tie-dyed memories.
At the height of Max mania, in the late '60s and early '70s, the bright colors of his pop art were everywhere -- his signature electric blues, sunshine yellows and Day-Glo pinks.
The work appeared on album covers and billboards, sheets, towels and note pads, concert posters and magazine covers, including those of Time and Life.
He believed in creating art for the people, and he had 72 product lines with designs that needed to be updated several times a year. Max was young, hip and busy. And, oh yes, happy.
"The '60s were wonderful, euphoric; I still live in it today," Max says. "I was an artist, a painter, a serious collagist, but when the Beatles came to America and their art was everywhere, I thought, `Why can't my art be everywhere?' Unknowingly, I became to art what the Beatles were to music."
By 1971, Max was worth millions, and he began wondering where his work was heading. He had taken a two-month hiatus in 1964 that ended up lasting two years. Was his work too commercial?
"There's no such thing as too commercial," he says. "If you're creative and you're an artist, you're a creative artist."
Still, he decided to take a four-month retreat from what he called "the outside world" to renew his creative energies every day in front of his easel.
"I asked myself: `Do I want to keep running all around the country, or do I want to stay in front of my easel and be surprised every day, every hour, by what appears on the canvas?' " he says. "Putting it like that, there was really no choice."
Max reduced his staff from 55 to six and began leading a much more private life -- which, surprisingly to him, lasted 18 years.
During that time, he sold a few works, but his primary focus was painting and creating.
But he emerged from his solitude, and he is enjoying it.
"I missed the outside activity," he says. "I missed the yin and yang of the outside world. I missed being with the cops, with the movers and shakers, with the people who make things happen."
His style has changed from the crisp, almost flat coloring-book look of the '60s to a softer, swirling look, with many multicolored brush strokes.
Max still has some of his kitschy '60s style -- such as big sunsets, blue seas and "the flower-blossom lady" -- but he has picked up the celebrity portrait market that the late Andy Warhol worked so successfully -- from Queen Noor of Jordan to the Dalai Lama and Forty Gorbys, his portrait of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Not to mention his Statue of Liberty with pouty lips.
He clearly likes the rich and famous, and he enjoys meeting everyone from business people to astronauts, but he seems to like ordinary folks just as much.
"I've painted presidents, princesses, queens, all kinds of celebrities," he says. "But when I do a little drawing for a friend of mine who has had a baby, and they love it, that makes me just as happy."
While his artwork may seem exotic and flamboyant, his background seems just as unusual, and it has obviously influenced his painting style.
Born in Berlin, Germany, in the late '30s, he was 2 months old when the family fled to Shanghai. His Russian-Jewish father established a prosperous import/export business and at one point owned a large store that sold Western attire.
Max remembers swimming in Tibetan lakes, visiting Buddhist monasteries and watching colorful wedding celebrations and funeral parades.
"I can tell you that the Chinese people are one of the most beautiful races on earth," he says. "They are humble, sweet, creative, and they are some of the most amazing craftsmen. It was a very colorful world. Every single day, there would be a parade ... three to four blocks long with dragons and thousands of people."
China was also where he began developing his spiritual side. He remembers looking into the eyes of elderly men (who, he now realizes, were monks) and seeing what he describes as "a deep ocean of love."
The postwar years took his family from China through Tibet, India, South Africa, Israel, Italy and a year in Paris, where he took afternoon art classes at the Louvre.
Eventually, his family moved to New York, first Brooklyn and then Manhattan, where he graduated from high school. He intended to become an astronomer, which horrified his father, who worried that he would not be able to make a living. Then he did something worse -- he became an artist.
In the early '60s, he made a name for himself on Madison Avenue with his colorful graphics and perfume ads. But his first taste of national fame came in the mid-'60s when, on The Ed Sullivan Show, he created a painting by wielding brushes in both hands -- he had recently discovered he was ambidextrous.
It was a time when the black-and-white '50s were turning into living color -- in magazines and on TV -- and his sense of color fit right in.
"Color was my world," he says.
His comeback in the late '80s was marked by battles with the Internal Revenue Service. Last June, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion on charges that he had concealed more than $1.1 million in income. He refers to it as his "small tax problem." But Max is so upbeat that he enjoyed the time his community work with poor children -- teaching them to draw and paint.
"It was just bad management, and I regret it happened," he says. "I should have paid more attention. It was my responsibility, and I took the blame for it. But it was a very small part of my life."
But Max is finished with all that now, and color is still his world. He has been the official artist for five Super Bowls and five Grammy ceremonies, among other things. A passionate environmentalist and animal-rights advocate, he is involved in numerous charitable events. His next project involves working with actress Julia Roberts to help save orangutans.
"The whole key for me is how creative I can be every day and how I can be at my maximum peak, between 90 and 100 percent," says Max, who has a four-story studio close to Lincoln Center in Manhattan. "I never want to be just 40 to 50 percent creative. As long as I'm creative, I feel very secure and happy."
But Max is not just stuck in the past. He loves people such as Bill Gates and the world of cyperspace -- seeing it as an extension of '60s dreams and ideas. He thinks digital information is the rock 'n' roll of our time and has plans for an interactive Web site to start soon.
"The media is my canvas; the cyberuniverse is my canvas," he says. "If Picasso, Matisse and Gaugin ... were alive today, they would want to be on MTV."
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