Maxed out: ‘Cosmic’ artist Peter Max shows his true, patriotic colors

Kirk Baird

Wednesday, May 15, 2002 | 8:28 a.m.

When the horrors of Sept. 11 unfolded, most Americans were struggling with a mix of grief and disbelief.

After seeing live on tele-vision the plane crash into the second World Trade Center tower, Peter Max, who lives in New York, did what he almost always does: He painted.

That is not to suggest the renowned artist, who helped give the '60s its psychedelic edge with his "Cosmic '60s" art, was uncaring.

In fact, quite the opposite.

At first Max wanted to go to City Hall to see if he could help out his friend, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But security was tightened considerably and restricted access to the mayor's office. It was then that an associate of Max reminded the artist, who appears Friday through Sunday at the GRAMMY Art of Music Gallery in the Forum Shops at Caesars, of what he should be doing.

"He said, 'Peter, why don't you do what you do best? Why don't you do some posters and let's do a fund-raiser right away,'" Max said in a recent interview from Boston, where he was putting on an exhibition of his work.

So the 64-year-old artist retreated into his studio and created six patriotic paintings, using the Statue of Liberty and the American flag as focal points.

"I wanted so much to participate, to do good and be a helping instrument," he said. "I was thinking about the family members the poor kids and the poor wives and the poor people who died."

Thus far the paintings have generated $1 million in relief funds, which were divided between three beneficiaries: the Twin Towers Fund, the September 11th Fund and Survivors Fund.

While Sept. 11 created a pro-U.S. fervor this country had not seen since the yellow-ribbon days of the Gulf War in the early '90s, Max has always maintained a patriotic zeal.

The artist has been painting Lady Liberty annually on July 4 since 1976's bicentennial. He has also painted portraits of the last five U.S. presidents, and plans to visit President George W. Bush soon to capture his image on canvas.

The simple fact is, Max loves the United States.

"This country is a melting pot, and it makes us the most creative country on the planet, besides being the most generous, the richest, the most inventive and the strongest," he said. "The best export on planet Earth is American democracy."

And Max should know.

The artist was born in Germany and, before making the United States his permanent home at age 16, he spent his youth in China, Israel, Italy and France.

No matter where he and his family lived, though, the United States is where Max longed to be, especially with its movie and sports icons -- essentially the roots of today's pop-culture phenomenon.

"As a 9-year-old child in China I was very lucky (because) a friend's father owned a movie theater, so I was able to see every movie that came to China 12 times," Max said. "I knew more about American iconography than anybody I have met today. From Busby Berkley and the dancers to Rin Tin Tin and Groucho Marx, I knew every wacky character that America created."

He also collected comic books and almost any U.S. iconographic product he could find, a collection he maintains today.

Not surprisingly, this love of U.S. culture found its way into his art, making Max one of the leading artists of the pop- artmovement of the '60s and '70s.

But it was his fascination with the universe, melded with paint, that gave birth to his Cosmic art.

"All my life I wanted to be an astronomer," Max said. "I was fascinated by the distance between planets and light years and stuff like that. I was in disbelief the universe was so large."

At 12, Max shared with his mother his desire to be an astronomer.

"She kind of laughed and said, 'OK, my sweetie, whatever you want.' But when I got older, I still wanted to do that," he said.

It wasn't until he enrolled in a summer art class, at the behest of a friend, that Max considered becoming an artist.

"I didn't really know art is something that people do," he said. "And then I got the bug. I loved it. I loved painting and drawing and knowing that I finished it and accomplished something.

"And slowly I learned about creativity. That came much later, after art school. Creativity is not really about art, it's about anything that you can create. And I fell in love with it."

By the mid-'60s, after finishing art school, Max moved away from his photo-collage period, which had been inspired by contemporary photographers Bert Stern, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.

After meeting with Swami Satchidananda, an Indian yoga master who taught him meditation and Eastern spiritualism, Max began his Cosmic period. It was art known for its distinctive line work and bold color combinations, as well as pure psychedelia.

"It was pretty amazing -- my ideas of the cosmos and, of course, a little bit of yoga and the holy people," he said.

But the genesis of the style stemmed from a rather simple but perplexing question: " 'Why am I here? What is this all about?' Everybody has asked that -- every living soul," Max said. "The big 'why' in cosmology and in my art, sort of created cosmic styles ... of maybe the search of what it's all about."

The Cosmic style made Max a commercial and critical success. Even the media caught on: Life magazine devoted a 1969 cover story to the artist, entitled: "Peter Max: Portrait of the artist as a very rich man."

By the early '70s, however, Max had grown tired of the Cosmic '60s and went into a retreat for several years. The artist still painted -- except not for the benefit of others, but rather himself.

He was lured out of his commercial retirement to create an art book to commemorate the bicentennial, "Peter Max Paints America" (Acropolis Books), as well as his traditional Statue of Liberty painting.

Slowly, he emerged from his retreat. And, by the end of the '80s, among many other works, he had painted President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, for an installment called "Forty Gorbys."

"Forty Gorbys" created such a stir in post-communist Russia in 1991, that it drew the largest attendance in Soviet/Russian history -- 14,500 people -- when it premiered at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersberg.

In the '90s Max painted giant murals for the World's Fair, postage stamps for the United Nations, served as official artist for five Super Bowls, five Grammys, World Cup USA 1994, the U.S. Open and Earth Day.

He also painted the 600-foot stage for the 1999 Woodstock Music Festival, as well as a Boeing 777 wide body super jet for Continental Airlines, a project that totaled $160 million.

As big and prestigious as those works are, Max insists they are a very small part of his body of work.

"The famous-people thing and doing Grammys and Super Bowls and airplanes, that's like one-third of 1 percent of my activity," he said.

"I spend every day in the studio painting. Even here in Boston I brought with me papers of different sizes. I've done maybe 25 drawings this morning. I give myself a theme to not draw anything I've drawn before. As a creative person you are allowed to do that, whereas a guy on a bus route cannot drive some place he has not been."

And what of his Cosmic '60s art? Does Max believe it holds up well today?

"When I went to get away from it in the early '70s I had had enough of it. Now when I look at it, it is as vibrant as can be," he said. "And the young kids think it's the coolest, hippest thing they've ever seen.

"It was very pure, it was very fresh, so it's not like a fashion that can get out of style. It was a mythology, just like (George) Lucas created a mythology (with the 'Star Wars' series), a little bit of his own world, I've created my own world."

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