Peter Max’s art is as prolific as it is unique. He has created paintings, sculptures, tapestries, prints and photographs, which are featured in museums around the world.
Mr. Max’s artwork can be found in the permanent collections of more than 70 museums including The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and The Houston Museum Of Fine Arts.
He has been commissioned by The White House under five administrations, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, President Richard M. Nixon and President Jimmy Carter, who designated him “The Official Painter of The White House.”
Max created 47 large-scale public murals for buildings in New York City including his most famous works at Lord & Taylor Department Store for their flagship store on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street; at American Airlines Terminal 8 at JFK Airport; at the Sacred Heart Church on West 46th Street, just off Times Square; at ABC Television Studios on Lincoln Center Plaza; and on several subway stations throughout Manhattan such as Canal Street Station–Times Square Station–Broadway-Lafayette Station–Grand Central Station–42nd Street Station–42nd Street-Port
The artist Peter Max, who will be celebrating his 80th birthday on October 29, has been creating artwork for over 50 years. He is known for his signature style of art work, which features bold colors and shapes, as well as a variety of subjects he has painted.
His most iconic creations include the poster for the Woodstock Music Festival, his space-themed works from the 1970s and Chicago’s Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, which was painted by Max in 1986.
Peter Max is a self-proclaimed psychedelic artist. He first became famous with his artwork for the Woodstock festival in 1969, and since then has had numerous exhibitions and continued to create art for both commercial and personal projects.
His style depends on bright colors, strange patterns and psychedelic images such as spaceships, flowers, and faces.
Max was born in Berlin in 1937, and his father’s work had taken the family to India when he was still young. The young Peter was inspired by the colors of the East India Company flag that flew over the local British Army barracks. The colors inspired him to become an artist when he grew up, he says. After returning to Germany, Max studied at the Academy of Arts in West Berlin before moving to New York in 1958.
Calvin Klein chose Max’s work for his company’s fashions from the 1970s onwards. The musician Donovan even commissioned an album cover from him in 1970.
Most of Max’s work is created on large canvases measuring from six feet (1.8 meters) wide to more than 20 feet (6 meters) long. He has used acrylic paints for much of his career, though he has also used photography and computer graphics since the 1980s.
Max created a new master image every
Peter Max is an American artist known for his colorful and psychedelic paintings. He is especially known for his distinctive style of “Maxism”, which developed in the late 1960’s. Max and his wife, Patricia, have collaborated on several art projects together over the years. Although perhaps best known for his painting, Max also works in sculpture, film, music and 3-Dimensional art.
Max studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He was a student of the famous painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell who had a great influence on Max’s early work. After graduating in 1958 he became an illustrator for advertisements and magazines such as Esquire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy. In the 1960s he began painting psychedelic posters and album covers. His first one-man show was held in 1969 at the Noel Young Gallery in New York City. By 1970, he was an established artist with major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as well as many other galleries throughout the USA including one at Cornell University where he is currently a visiting artist.
In addition to managing Peter’s career, Patricia has also been a very successful artist in her own right with solo exhibitions of her own work at museums such
Peter Max (born June 29, 1937) is an American artist best known for his psychedelic posters of the 1960s and 1970s. He was born Peter Max Finkelstein in Berlin, Germany, and spent his early childhood there before moving to Shanghai, China. After graduating from high school in 1954, he moved to New York City, where he attended the School of Industrial Art.
At age 17, Max won a contest for one of his paintings at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The prize was a scholarship to study art at the Art Students League.
The artist credits much of his success to Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead who first exhibited Max’s work in 1966. Max claims that Garcia “discovered” him while Max was working on some posters for a concert by the band Love at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Garcia bought one of his works on the spot and six months later invited him to make a poster for a Grateful Dead concert. This poster was so popular that other bands such as Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company contracted Max to produce illustrations for their shows as well. In 1966, Max also produced a series of posters for Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium concerts in San Francisco.
Max has been married twice
Peter Max is an American artist, born in Germany, who has devoted a large part of his life to making art. The child of German Jewish Holocaust survivors, his work grew out of the postwar sensibility that saw the world as a place where anything was possible.
Max’s work has been part of the American popular culture, and he has been one of the leaders of the psychedelic movement since the 1960s. Initially inspired by rock music and mind-expanding drugs, Max’s art evolved into a more spiritual and metaphysical dimension. He was interested in exploring how color and different combinations of colors could affect people emotionally.
Tribute: Peter Max (born October 9, 1937) is a German-born American pop artist known for his signature style of painting psychedelic works featuring bright colors and bold patterns. His art developed in the late 1960s from a background first in surrealism, comic books and graffiti as well as Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Net” series. He is considered to be one of the pioneers among artists who have taken pop art to its extreme, with often overblown works featuring vibrant colors and patterns.
“I was never a hippie,” Max says. “But there was a time when I was signed to an agency that had been doing rock posters and they decided they were going to expand into the pop scene of the late 60s.”
“There was a lot of drugs and partying, but I did not do any of that. I was more interested in doing the work than going out and partying. I was married at the time, living on Long Island with my wife and son, and it was just too much to take on at that time.”
In 1969, Max quit his job in advertising and moved to New York City where he began painting full-time. He has lived there ever since. “I found a loft in Soho,” he says. “It had no bathroom or kitchen, but I didn’t need those things at the time.”
