Pop artist Peter Max, whose dreamy, boldly colored works provided an artistic backdrop for the 1960s US hippie movement and made him a commercial art powerhouse, died on Monday at a hospital in Manhattan at the age of 88, a spokesperson for his family said on Wednesday.
Born Peter Max Finkelstein in Berlin in 1937 to a Jewish family, Max spent his earliest years as a refugee from Nazi Germany. His parents fled with him to Shanghai, where thousands of European Jews found refuge during the Nazi era.
In 1948, the family left Shanghai for the newly established State of Israel, eventually settling in Haifa. Max lived in Israel for roughly three and a half years, learned and spoke Hebrew, and began taking painting lessons there under a Viennese artist. He later said that his Jewish upbringing included the observance of holidays such as Passover, Purim, and Yom Kippur.
Max described the Jewish communities of Shanghai, Israel and later Brooklyn as formative influences on his life and art. “I think that my Jewish heritage shaped me as an artist most by the love and caring I got from the Jewish community,” he said in a 2017 interview with the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle.
His refugee story also remained part of his public legacy. Material connected to Max has been displayed at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, which documents the community that sheltered Jews fleeing Europe.
A 2022 account of Max’s later life described him as a Jewish immigrant whose psychedelic work became one of the defining visual signatures of American popular culture.
Max’s visions, often influenced by his love of astronomy, were everywhere in the ’60s and ’70s and almost as much a part of the decade’s youth culture as sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. They were like artistic renderings of an acid trip and were, in the vernacular of the time, really groovy.
The colors were vibrant and the images surreal: cosmic landscapes and starbursts, doves and floating peace symbols, kaleidoscopic butterflies, puffy clouds and other flower-power imagery. Rock stars such as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger were Max’s portrait subjects, as well as his friends.
His ties to Israel continued to surface in his work. Among his Jewish and Israeli-themed pieces was “36 Rabins,” a series of portraits of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
President Ronald Reagan was a fan, and Max donated a painting of the Statue of Liberty to the Reagan Presidential Library.
“His decorative posters show Max to be a visionary fascinated by time, space and evolution,” a 1967 Village Voice critique said. “A psychedelic skyline prophesizes the day when skyscrapers may be temples, when the Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Room may be used for meditation.”
Max is survived by his daughter, Libra, and his son, Adam.
“My father was my best friend. I feel incredibly blessed to have been so deeply loved and to be his daughter. I hope that alongside his remarkable artistic legacy, people will remember his kindness, his gentleness, and how much he genuinely cherished putting joy into the world,” his daughter said in a statement.
