After nearly 40 years in the limelight, Peter Max counts his blessings.
"I'm very, very lucky," Max says, speaking in his faintly Germanic accent, from his home in New York. "I have 105 people working for me ... I'm very lucky to have all this."
But then he also notes that he was equally fortunate to have had the foresight to build a business from his art, something he most assuredly did not learn at the Art Students League. His savvy, not unlike that of Andy Warhol, his sometime cookie-jar-scavenging acquaintance, moved him to merge his traditional training with the mid-century commercial graphics aesthetic.
He became the literal poster-boy of the 1960s, thanks in large part to his trippy, colorful "cosmic" style, and has managed to ride success into this century.
His keen sense of opportunity brings him to Las Vegas this weekend, to open The Art of Peter Max gallery at the Forum Shops. The idea for the gallery came from acquaintance David Hakan, says Max. Long-time marketing director for the Moody Blues, Hakan is also the gallery's president and CEO.
"Of the 30 galleries I show with, this is the only one that will be year-round," Max notes. "I have had some shows in Las Vegas, and they were exceptionally successful." Not only locals but visitors from all over bought work. Ordinarily, he says, a gallery exhibition might last a month," but in Las Vegas the people change so fast." Thus a full-time source of Peter Max paintings, priced from $1,200 to $150,000, is in order.
But his gallery, Max promises, will not be static. "I will probably ... have all new works maybe every six weeks."
The installation was organized by in-house curator Ada Lau, who puts together all of Max's shows. "She just knows how to do it," he says. The paintings will be accented by an installation of plasma-screen panels that project images of Max paintings, thanks to a suggestion from another friend, Peter Weedfall, a marketing manager for Samsung. From 10 feet away, Max says, you can't tell the Samsung panels from the paintings. "I just love technology."
Max plans to do video work with Samsung. "I love the medium a lot," he comments. "I'm just dying to do some work with these people."
Born in Europe and raised in China and Israel, Max has been working with, and for, a impressive array of people and organizations for four decades. He has been official artist for five Super Bowls, the World Cup and the Grammy Awards. Max's work for his adopted homeland includes portraits of four presidents and painting the Statue of Liberty every July 4. He even helped get the statue's restoration under way in the 1980s.
But that did not immunize him from being sentenced in 1998 to two months‚ prison time for concealing more than $1.1 million in income from the government, by bartering paintings in partial payment for homes. Max says he thought he was recapitulating something Picasso would do—make a drawing to pay a restaurant tab. "I apologized," says Max, adding that he holds no grudge. "I love this country."
Max says he learned a lot from the episode, which is somewhat in keeping with his Eastern-influenced philosophy, shaped in part by Indian yoga Swami Satchidananda. Fascinated first by astronomy, Max says the started studying art as something of a fluke of opportunity. But he believes creativity is inherent in everyone. "The universe wants to be creative," says Max. "If it wants to come through, I have the skill to set it down."
And the sense to make the most of that skill. Nonetheless, Max says he once reached a point at which he realized he had become too commercial, making clocks and the like, and decided to devote himself exclusively to art. He is helped in that endeavor by "an exceptionally creative studio," and by that staff of 105.
"I turns out, when you have a good business around you," says Max. "You have more time to be an artist."