Peter Max, the artist whose swirling, technicolor psychedelic style became one of the defining visual languages of the 1960s, has died at 88.
Max died Monday, September 14, according to a written statement from his son, Adam Max, released Wednesday. No cause of death was given, though Max had been suffering from advanced dementia for several years.
Born Peter Max Finkelstein in Berlin in 1937 to a German Jewish family that fled to Shanghai in 1938, Max eventually settled in New York, where he opened a graphic design studio in the early 1960s. His bold, kaleidoscopic imagery - inspired in part by his fascination with astronomy and Eastern philosophy, which he channeled into what he called his "Cosmic '60s" period - quickly became inseparable from the era's flower-power counterculture.
Max's reach extended far beyond gallery walls. He served as the official artist for the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Indianapolis 500, the World Cup and the World Series, and his work appeared on a Boeing 777, a Norwegian Cruise Line ship, and the covers of the Manhattan Yellow Pages. He painted portraits ranging from U.S. presidents to Taylor Swift, and appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1969.
"We will remember his extraordinary creativity, his warmth, his curiosity, and the way he saw beauty and possibility everywhere," Adam Max wrote in the statement. "His art became part of American culture, but the man behind that art - the father we knew and loved - is the person we will miss most."
Max's decades-long fascination with the cosmic and the spiritual gave his work a searching, almost devotional quality that outlasted its 1960s origins - a reminder that even the most secular art can carry a longing for something beyond the material world.
