Peter Max, the psychedelic pop artist whose rainbows and cosmic jumpers wallpapered the 1960s, has died. He was 88. Max died Monday in Manhattan after a long struggle with dementia, the New York Times reports. A teetotaling vegetarian who credited yoga, not drugs, for his mind-bending visuals, Max turned simple, cheery graphics into a mass-market juggernaut—his imagery ended up on linens, clocks, airplanes, and a US postage stamp, for a total, he said, of 70 product lines. "My work was really, I would say, almost exploited," Max once said, per the AP.
Born Peter Max Finkelstein in Berlin in 1937, he fled Nazism with his family to Shanghai, then moved to Israel and finally Brooklyn, where he pivoted from astronomy dreams to art school. By the late '60s, his posters were selling by the millions, he was on the cover of Life, and his work was showing up everywhere, including at world's fairs, per the Times. The drawback to the success, Max said, was that he "wasn't painting anymore." So he shut the business down for a period in the early 1970s to reconnect with his art. One of his biggest projects after returning to public life was a series of portraits of the Statue of Liberty, painted at the White House at the invitation of first lady Nancy Reagan in 1981.
Max later designed the MTV logo and a World Cup poster, and his brand kept churning even as dementia advanced, sparking battles over who was really making the art and who controlled his lucrative studio. Explaining his work, Max said: "The colors are strong, sometimes loud, sometimes raw and sometimes harmonious, but always powerful, and the images are always on the side of the peaceful nature. I don't discuss in my paintings negative things, I don't dwell on it in my mind and don't dwell on it in my canvasses." Putting it more succinctly in another interview, Max said, "I see everything through rainbow eyes."
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