Take one look at the cover of the premier issue of Las Vegas Magazine, and you'll see that pop artist Peter Max is still living a colorful life. Max, whose vibrant work also has appeared on the covers of Time and Life magazines, created a psychedelic new world of color in the 1960s and '70s with a bold style of painting that used dramatic juxtapositions-including his trademark electric blues and Day-Glo pinks-and depicted hippie iconography of the times. Working with everything from oils, acrylics and watercolors to charcoal, pen and silk screens, Max rose to prominence as a designer of books, posters and album covers.
Born in Berlin in 1937, Max (whose real name is Peter Finkelstein) was raised in Shanghai and Israel before his family settled in the United States in 1953. After training in New York at the Art Students League, Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts, Max opened a design studio and began making his signature silk screens in 1964. The rest is art history.
Max gained attention when he created an original painting on The Ed Sullivan Show. "I guess I did define the '60s style," Max has said. "It was fantastic, a whole new style in everything-music, art, clothes. Beatlemania came in then, and I was sort of the visual counterpart to all of that."
A passionate environmentalist and defender of human and animal rights, Max has dedicated his paintings and posters to numerous noteworthy causes. In 1976, he started his annual Fourth of July tradition of painting the Statue of Liberty. He also has painted five U.S. presidents (Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton), designed an album cover for Aretha Franklin and used a hammer and chisel to carve a peace dove into a section of the Berlin Wall. Although the days of tie-dye and flower power are long gone, this multidimensional creative artist has kept evolving. His unique vision and kaleidoscopic palette continue to color our world-and our first cover!