One of the things I have enjoyed on the Ship has been the art lectures, auctions, and perusing the art gallery of the Park West Gallery here on the ship. The first lecture was on Peter Max. I had seen some of his work before but was ignorant of the affect he had on the art scene and the culture, particularly in the 60s and 70s, although his influence was also felt later with his efforts to raise $260 million in conjunction with Lee Iacocca to refurbish the Statue of Liberty. He was also very active in helping to raise money for over a thousand charities with his art. The recognition he received not only in the art world as well as in the mainstream media made me realize how sheltered and ignorant I was of popular culture and of the counter cultural movements of my youth. The 60s and 70s were a very important and turbulent time in the US with the anti-war protests, the heightened awareness (strife, anger, legislation, etc.) of racial issues, and the ‘sexual revolution’. My sheltered cloistered existence in a remote religious and conservative small town kept me to an extent oblivious to much of what was happening at the time. My culture consisted largely of listening to my mother’s favorite music, the Strauss walzes, the public radio station at the religious college where my father taught (which played a more diverse classical music selection), and the slight crack in this world; the one local radio station that played some modern music – with its requisit censoring (as in Jim Croce’s song ‘Bad, bad Leroy Brown’ in which the words ‘baddest man in the whole damn town’ became ‘baddest man in the whole down town’ 🤣) – when I started driving as a teenager.
I was more likely to hear about Nixon’s war on drugs than Peter Max’s pop art (interesting because the art he was contacted to create for the welcome signs to the US was mothballed in the 70s until the 80s because they were considered to psychedelic and inviting to the drug culture by the Nixon administration), let alone what was happening in Haight Ashbury (which streets I was able to actually walk down decades later living in SF); across the bay in Oakland, in Watts, Philadelphia, etc.; Woodstock, or (horror of horrors) Timothy Leary’s LSD espousal. The Beatles and Elvis were decried in this society as the height of decadence and the beginning of the end of civilized society. Not that I had a chance to find out what all the hubbub was all about until years later, when, for me, as an adult, it all seemed rather enjoyable and innocuous (the Beatles and Elvis I mean).
Anyway, back to Peter Max. I learned that he was one of the first artists to bring art ownership to the masses by creating posters of his art, which were required dorm room decoration for millions of college students and young people living everywhere, except of course me and others sharing my cultural vacuum. (It also made him very wealthy, an early billionaire – too bad van Gogh didn’t think of this, or have the wherewithal to exploit this technology, ‘Starry Night’ could have been de riguer for young people way back in the late 19th century excavating him from his poverty and perhaps depression.) He was also commissioned to create an environmental postage stamp for the USPS (US Postal Service), the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, the 1994 World Cup, the Grammy Awards, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Super Bowl.
He and his family, being Jewish, escaped Germany and fled to China in the late 1930s, then because of the political situation there, moved first to Israel, then to Paris and finally they moved to the US in the 1940s. Like the late impressionists, and possibly others (I am unfortunately rather ignorant about art, although apparently not as ignorant as everyone else at art trivia here on the ship – as I won the art trivia contest with sixteen correct out of twenty 😲), his art and use of color was greatly impacted by Asian art and artists. He was very prolific, besides being an iconic trendsetter. Unfortunately, I understand he is no longer producing art as he has dementia. His art is as I mentioned very colorful, which conveys a very happy positive outlook. The piece below is one of his most famous, called ‘Umbella Man’.
