Peter Max, the Psychedelic Artist Who Was Friends with The Beatles, Has Died at 88

Peter Max, the psychedelic pop art artist who came up in the 1960s with the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Keith Haring, died at 88 years old on Monday.

The artist’s death was confirmed by his son Adam Max. In a statement, he said that his father will be remembered for his “extraordinary creativity, his warmth, his curiosity, and the way he saw beauty and possibility everywhere. 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 had long suffered from dementia.

Max’s DayGlo trippy graphics were globally recognized. He designed MTV’s logo in the 1980s and the official poster for the 1994 FIFA World Cup that was hosted in the US, as well as the Super Bowl XXIX in 1995 and Super Bowl XXXI in 1997. His artwork was always on the happy side coinciding with the 1960s Flower Power movement.

“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,” he said in an interview, while in another he described his vision as seeing “everything through rainbow eyes.”

Max was born in 1937 in Berlin to German-Jewish parents who fled the city from the occupation of Nazis in 1938 to Shanghai, where the artist discovered bright colors, a stark contrast from his parents’ bleak past. For a majority of his childhood, Max moved around. In 1948, the family left Shanghai for Haifa in Israel as the Maoist revolution was beginning to take shape, Mao Zedong gained power on October 1, 1949. As the family journeyed to the US, they lived in Paris for nine months, where Max took drawing classes at the Louvre Museum before settling in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in 1952.

Max’s academic foray into the arts started in 1956, where he attended the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan to study under the painter and muralist Frank J. Reilly, who had also studied at the same art school with Norman Rockwell. After graduating art school, Max teamed up with his friend Tom Daly to start Daly & Max Studio, a small arts studio working on book cover illustrations and graphic design. The influence of Reilly and Rockwell’s American realism can be seen in Max’s painting for Meade Lux Lewis’ 1962 album cover The Blues Piano Artistry of Meade Lux Lewis, which won a gold medal at the Society of Illustrators.

But it was in his mid-20s in 1963 that Max’s artistry started veering into psychedelic motifs. Otto Bettmann, the founder of Bettmann Archive, invited Max and Daly to work on an exhibition celebrating the archive’s 25th anniversary. In Bettmann Panopticon, which opened to the public in 1964 at the School of Visual Arts Visual Arts Gallery, Max and Daly had taken images from the archive and mirrored them for a hallucinatory effect.

Max then traveled to Paris to consult on a film for filmmaker Conrad Rooks and met Swami Satchidananda, an Indian guru and yoga teacher. “He introduced me to yoga, meditation, and a vegetarian diet. So, I became a vegetarian, and I stayed a vegetarian for many years,” Max told the Vegetarian Times. Max persuaded Rooks to invite Satchidananda to the US, where he eventually helped him open the Integral Yoga Institute. “The Swami and yoga taught me a whole new way to draw. It empowered me to feel the cosmic consciousness within, and to allow that to flow out of me into my art,” said Max, who befriended the Beatles at the same time, where they bonded over art, yoga, and Eastern mysticism.

Max’s popularity and reputation began to soar in the late ’60s. He entered a partnership with Security Printing Company to create Peter Max Posters, selling millions of copies of 25 of his designs to bookstores and department stores. He also designed commercial posters for the American Cancer Society, the Peace Corps, and the United Nations.

In 1967, he used his pop art posters to gather thousands of hippies at Central Park during Easter. His poster featured an illustration of a woman facing left with an abstract flower headdress and the word “Love” in big bold letters against a gradient rainbow backdrop. Max’s spacey art landed him spots on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where the set design was adorned with his poster. He was on the cover of Life magazine in 1969 and his colorful outlook was practically all over America, from a line of clocks and homeware to sneakers.

But like every rainbow, Max ran out of colors and by the 1970s, he wanted to call it quits. “I stopped cold. I was repeating myself creatively. I had filled myself with being everywhere, doing everything. I had had it,” he told People magazine in 1976. When he made his return to public life, he did so patriotically with a commission from the Swedish company ASEA to produce Peter Max Paints America (1976), a book featuring paintings and drawings celebrating the 50 states. In the late ’70s, Max produced bilingual “Welcome to the United States” signs that were installed along the Canadian and Mexican borders. To mark the celebration of the millennium, he dressed a Boeing 777 flight for Continental Airlines in his signature rainbow colors. In 2015, he was commissioned by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to design a poster for its induction ceremony, the same year that signs of Max’s dementia started coming out.

The worsening of Max’s dementia started a legal dispute between his wife Mary Balkin, 30 years his junior, who he married in 1997, and his two children, Adam and Libra, over his art and estate. In 2019, the New York Times did an investigation into Max’s depleting state and found that painters were recruited to paint in the style of Max, where then the artist would be instructed to sign each work. That same year, Balkin asked a New York court to appoint a guardian to oversee Max’s business. The same guardian that was appointed by Balkin told the courts that she treated her husband with neglect. In court, it came to light that Balkin would withhold food from Max and place large Brazil nuts in his smoothies in order to cause a choking hazard. Balkin later died of an apparent suicide in 2019.

Max’s daughter Libra took over her father’s business in 2019 with the court-appointed guardian in an effort to restore her father’s reputation by placing his artwork in museums and galleries.

Max is survived by his two children, Adam Cosmo and Libra Astro.