Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Peter Max
American (b. 1937)
PROFILE, BLUE AND GREEN (1972)
oil on canvas
23.625” x 23.5”

STYLE: POP ART

  

Born in Berlin during the Nazi years, Peter escaped with his family to Shanghai where he spent much of his childhood. He traveled with his family all over the world before they finally settled in Brooklyn when Max was 16. Max studied art at the Art Students League, and started designing album covers and book jackets in the early sixties. He credits the development of his “Cosmic Sixties” style, the colorful psychedelic look for which he is well known, to his discovery of mediation and Eastern philosophies under the guidance of Swami Satchidananda. The artist had created a style that seemed to define the sixties. Some of his more famous commissions included the artwork for Yellow Submarine and the stage for Woodstock. In addition, Max has created the official art for four Super Bowls, five Grammy Award shows, the World Cup USA in 1994 and the U.S. Open tennis tournament. Max went into seclusion in 1969, but continued to paint; he resumed his public persona in the eighties and is more popular with the general public than ever, though perhaps not taken seriously by the critical establishment. During the sixties, Max was open to putting his artwork on almost any consumer product, but in recent years has been more selective about marketing.

The Castellani Art Museum has a large collection of prints and paintings by Peter Max; most are from the late sixties and early seventies, when the artist was at the height of his “cosmic” style. They feature the simplified, linear forms and intense colors that made the artist famous.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Max interview, Peter Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/10/04
“What I did was, when I used to go to art directors' offices, I used to look and see what they collected. This must be the hip stuff today. I started mimicking where they went. Most of all, I started drawing and painting what I adore. I used to be a big astronomy buff. I started drawing Saturns and stars and moons and sky fliers and sky walkers, all these cosmic things. Also, because I grew up in China, there were all these monks with canes. I used to like how they looked. It was an easy shape to make. I started creating my own world. I drew in pen and ink, and then I started coloring it. Also because I lived in China, I was extremely good in colors. Why? I don't know. I think we had a housekeeper who was a little bit of an artist, and she used to bring colors over and tell me what colors looked nice with other colors. So I became this expert in color -- in my mind -- even though my colors were a little extreme, yellows and reds next to blues and all that stuff.”
Mary Abbe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 11/6/97
“…As design impresario to the bell-bottom generation, Max was everywhere in the late 1960s. Album covers, buses, T-shirts, billboards, plates, cups, sheets, towels, note pads and the covers of Time, Life and the Manhattan Yellow Pages - all exploded with "Maximal" colors and designs: stars, moons, sunsets and cascades of hearts and flowers in electric blue, sunshine yellow, Day-Glo pink, orange and lime.
"Putting my art on objects and going into the media was very modern," Max said. "That was where it belonged to reach the culture, and it resulted in a billion-dollar retail business between 1967 and 1971."
At the height of Max-imania he had 72 product lines, whose designs had to be updated several times a year.
... Like Warhol, he often silk-screens photographic images of his subjects onto prepainted canvases. Unlike Warhol - whose background colors were often stark white, bruised blue or silver - Max prefers rainbow colors that flatter his subjects.
‘I had done those photographic silk-screens as early as he did,’ Max said of his friend Warhol. ‘Everybody was doing things like that then, the way people today use computer images. Only when he became famous for it, I retreated because I didn't want to be doing the same thing.’”
Felicity Barringer, New York Times, 8/9/92
“‘I love the media,’ he said. ‘Media is a billboard, a T-shirt, posters, postcards, a baseball jacket with something on it. That's modern media. If Picasso were alive today, he'd probably work in video. Why couldn't Gaugin want to have one of his images on a baseball jacket?’
Creativity, he said, is what really matters. ‘Love’ is his verb of choice when he discusses it. ‘I love a thick load of brushes and I like a lot of color on the brush and I love the movement, the fact I am six to eight inches away from my canvas. The first stroke as it lays itself on the canvas -- that is what I love the most. The second most is looking in a mirror and seeing my art far away.’”