Peter Max, Psychedelic Pop Art Icon of the 1960s, Dead at 88

The Brooklyn-based artist was known for his euphoric, color-saturated posters and portraits

Peter Max, the German-American artist whose psychedelic posters and rainbow-hued portraits of everyone from Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr to President Obama and Taylor Swift made him a defining artist of the pop art movement, has died. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his close friend and family’s spokesperson, Michael Pagnotta, who worked for Max in the mid-80s. Pagnotta said the artist died on Monday at a Manhattan hospital after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He said Max is survived by his children, Max and Libra, who “loved him very much.”

“He had a very expansive mind. As much as the Beatles provided a soundtrack for that era and for that generation, Peter visualized it, and he just exploded onto the scene in the late 1960s,” Pagnotta said. “Whatever kind of post-war optimism existed in the country, even though it was very turbulent times, Peter was able to capture that and marry it to that sort of spiritual eastern magical mystery thing, and it worked perfectly. And he believed in the mass appeal of what he was doing. He believed in making art accessible to people.”

Max was born Peter Max Finkelstein to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1937. His family fled Nazi persecution when he was still an infant and spent about a decade in Shanghai before living for several years in Israel and eventually settling in Brooklyn in 1953.

After high school, Max began his formal training at the Art Students League of New York, which also counted the major postwar artists Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly among its former students. Their evolution from abstract expressionism into pop art helped usher in the movement and the bright, familiar everyday imagery that Max would embrace in his joyful, kaleidoscopic works.

Max’s instantly recognizable “Be In” poster layered the word Love over a rainbow background and helped inspire “several hundred thousand hippies” to gather in New York City’s Central Park to immortalize the Summer of Love, Max’s website recalls.

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His ubiquitous “Cosmic Jumper” was a seemingly weightless figure clad in a bell-bottomed suit who soared through joyful dreamscapes saturated with bands of bright colors. The character was featured on a 1974 postage stamp to commemorate the Spokane World’s Fair.

In the 1970s, the federal government hired Max to design a series of “Welcome to the U.S.” signs for entry points along the Canadian and Mexican borders. His trippy designs, drenched in bright pink, blue, and yellow, initially ended up in storage after some officials questioned their psychedelic vibe. President Jimmy Carter eventually revived the project, and in 1978, more than a hundred of the signs were installed at border crossings, greeting millions of travelers entering the country.

Max’s euphoric counterculture posters became coveted décor everywhere from college dorm rooms to entertainment-industry executive suites, while his designs were licensed for a dizzying array of consumer goods, including umbrellas, neckties, and lunch boxes. Max was often linked to the music of the Beatles, though he was not involved in the 1969 Beatles movie Yellow Submarine, which featured art similar to his work from the Czech-German illustrator Heinz Edelmann.

In his 2013 visual memoir, The Universe of Peter Max, the artist recounted his life story and thanked his many influences along the way, including the renowned yoga master Swami Satchidananda, “who taught me the art of letting go and being in the flow.”

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“To me, the universe is itself the ultimate expression of creativity. That we, as human beings, have been endowed with the ability to channel that creativity fills me with a sense of awe and wonder. When I tap into my inner cosmos — that nucleus of creativity within me — it becomes a source of ever-expanding possibilities, enabling me to go from magical adventure to another,” he wrote.  

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote the book’s introduction, praising Max for recognizing the “marvels of our universe” and capturing “the soul of the cosmos on canvas.”