If any artist was responsible for defining the visual vocabulary of the 1960s, it was Peter Max, whose vividly fluorescent paintings, posters and graphic imagery were ubiquitous during the era of flower children and the Age of Aquarius.
Countless college dorm rooms of the late ’60s and early ’70s had a Peter Max poster on the wall, next to the burning incense. Through savvy marketing, his pulsating colors and images adorned hundreds of objects - from buses and subways to pantyhose and the soles of sneakers that imprinted his name in the earth and sand.
Mr. Max’s color-saturated, almost hallucinatory depictions of stars, sun rays and people in profile showed up on walls and coffee mugs, on clothing, clocks, stationery, and even airplanes and cruise ships. In some ways, Mr. Max created the graphic equivalent of the rock-and-roll revolution in music.
I was lucky enough to meet Peter (definitely not 'Pete') on St. John back in '91 when I was running a restaurant on island. He was friendly, although somewhat stand-offish and shy, but we hit it off almost immediately. When they were getting ready to leave, he asked for a clean cloth mapkin and when I gave it to him, he doodled for a few minutes and signed 'To Joe, from your new friend Peter'.
A while later, having left the restaurant and gone in to construction, he called me frantic from New York and asked me to rebuild his house. The task was demanding. The entire deck and roof of the house were gone. With my crew, we completely rebuilt the house in a couple of months. When we were finished, he sent me and Babs two first class tickets to New York, where he invited us in to his studio, and he gifted us two of his original paintings. I had them up until just about a year ago when I sold them both to a collector for a nice five figure sum. Truly a geat guy. A genius in a real sense. He is missed...
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