The Summer of Max: Peter Max Marks Summer of Love’s 50th Anniversary at Ocean Galleries
Peace Doves
Cosmic, colorful and creative.
Ask iconic artist Peter Max for his memories of 1967 – the so-called Summer of Love – and those are three words that roll off his tongue.
Musically, the Beatles, the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin and psychedelic rockers Vanilla Fudge recorded the soundtrack of the Summer of Love, which sprang out of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and spread around the country.
But it was Max, who already had established himself as one of the world’s top pop-culture artists of the era, whose vivid paintings provided the visuals half a century ago.
Max will bring those memories into colorful and cosmic focus when he returns to Ocean Galleries in Stone Harbor during the Fourth of July holiday period. His newest collection of paintings and some of his most celebrated imagery from the Summer of Love will be displayed and offered for sale June 30 through July 5.
Max will be at the gallery Saturday and Sunday, July 1-2, from 7 to 9pm, to personally meet his fans.
Peter Max has been called “America’s Painter Laureate,” and the show he has created for his annual visit to Seven Mile Beach will include images that captured the spirit of the 1960s youth movement.
Art critics lauded his works as the visual complement to the music of the era. Some people theorized Max was in some way responsible for the creation of the Beatles’ visuals for their song, “Yellow Submarine,” but that’s an argument that could take hours. Max claims he helped on the movie version of “Yellow Submarine,” but others who worked on the film claim he didn’t.
“I had several conversations with (the Beatles) about ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ” was all Max would say during a recent phone interview with Seven Mile Times from his New York City home.
Max, who turns 80 in August, calls the Summer of Love a very creative period in his life.
“There was just an explosion of (youth) back then,” he says, noting that he probably would have never become such a worldwide phenomenon were it not for his acceptance by people in the demographic sweet spot for the Summer of Love.
“I could have never gotten that kind of (reaction) just being in galleries,” he says.
Some who grew up during that period consider Max the artist who ushered in the 1960s. Max says it was during the 1960s when he discovered the style of artistic realism that ultimately defined his work.
“I had a style that came to me accidentally, and suddenly I was like in the middle of the cultural flow,” he says. “It was ludicrous. People said that (my) art style that was so cosmic, that was so stars and planets. Something was happening to me that was 1,000 times greater than my highest expectations.”
His eclectic career has embraced a variety of mediums, but it’s painting that he seems to enjoy best. His art can be found on things as small as a postage stamp to something enormous, like the bow of the 1,100-foot cruise ship, the Norwegian Breakaway.
Years earlier, Max was commissioned to paint a Boeing 777 wide-bodied airliner for Continental Airlines.
Even after a lifetime of painting, the process continues to enthrall and intrigue him.
“I’m constantly painting and creating art,” he says. “And if I’m not painting, I’m thinking about painting. It was no different [in 1967]. I painted whatever I saw.”
Although some art critics have labeled his work as overly commercial and not serious, Max begs to differ. Yes, he admits, his art has been commercially successful.
But rare is the artist who isn’t trying to earn a few bucks from their works. In Max’s case, his success can be measured in the tens of millions of dollars he and his galleries have earned from the sale of his works.
Peter Max Finkelstein was born in 1937 in pre-World War II Nazi Germany. His Jewish family fled the Nazis one year later and then lived in Shanghai for 10 years.
Inspired and fascinated as a child by colorful Chinese art, he looked for every opportunity to draw on something, even if it was on a wall.
“My parents inspired me and encouraged me” to become an artist, Max says.
The Finkelstein family lived a fairly nomadic existence and traveled through Tibet, southern Africa, India, Italy, Israel and France. Along the way, Max tucked away some visual memories of the various stops during his young life. Some of those elements can still be seen in his part today.
He was fascinated by the monks of Tibet during their meditations as they carried their walking sticks and chanted by a waterfall at sunset. Even today, more than six decades later, some elements of the monks and the sticks pop up in his paintings.
Max was in his early teens when his family moved from Paris to America. By then, he’d already discovered the artistic wonders and mysteries of the Louvre, the world’s largest museum that houses the most outstanding collection of art ever assembled.
Settling in New York, Max continued his artistic studies at the Art Students League in Manhattan, where he learned anatomy, composition and figure drawing.
In the early 1960s, Max and a friend opened a small art studio in Manhattan, right around the same time he painted what would be the first of a seemingly endless catalog of celebrities. His subject was Marilyn Monroe, and he did the painting not long before the big-screen sex symbol died of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills.
“It was right at the beginning (of my career) and I got to know her and love her and work with her,” Max says. “She was an amazing person to work with.”
By the mid-1960s, as the psychedelic era was unfolding, Max’s artistic style kept pace with the times. His colorful counterculture imagery blended with the times, resulting in a series of commercially successful paintings and prints. Rare was the college dorm room that didn’t have at a Peter Max poster on the wall.
Because art has dominated his life since childhood, and because he has mastered so many styles, it’s difficult to imagine Max as anything but an artist. But if his art career hadn’t panned out, he says he would have considered a career as an astronomer.
“I’ve always wanted to be more involved in astronomy,” he says. “I love all the planets, the stars, all the [things] that surround us in space. It’s just mind-boggling. We’re living on this little planet called Earth, which may seem big to us, but it’s among millions and millions and millions of other planets out there.”
