Graphic, and eventually, museum-and-gallery artist Peter Max was born on this day in 1937 (he died just this past September 14 at age 88.) Givin the brashness of his work, Max comes across as surprisingly soft-spoken in this interview from nine years ago. Watch:
The social upheaval of the 1960s was matched, maybe even surpassed, by the aesthetic upheaval of the same period. Everything--book jackets, album covers, clothing, hair styles, dorm rooms--just looked different, way different, at the end of the decade than it did at the beginning, as the avant-garde became commonplace, and the whole world fell under the spell of Day-Glo. Chief among the conjurors was Peter Max, whose psychedelic incantations came to epitomize the counterculture. However, there was a catch. Though it's downplayed in the above video, Max was an adman, albeit a highly unconventional one. Much more conventional were the corporate clients who paid his keep. Just whose culture was being countered, anyway? Not that I lose sleep over any of this. While the goal of advertising may be to separate our wallets from our money in the pursuit of goods and services, the ads themselves remain free, and that made Max's own goods a bargain, at least as far as my bedazzled eyes are concerned. A trippy Dow Jones sampling of his work:
Carson's set looked a bit different by the end of the '60s, at least when Max was the guest.
A public service announcement:
Finally, as no client that I know of asked for it, this poster may qualify as art for art's sake:
For limited time only.
