Peter Max, Psychedelic Pop Art Icon of the 1960s, Dead at 88

Peter Max , the German-American artist whose psychedelic posters and rainbow-hued portraits of everyone from Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr to President Obama and Taylor Swift made him a defining artist of the pop art movement, has died. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his close friend and family’s spokesperson, Michael Pagnotta, who worked for Max in the mid-80s. Pagnotta said the artist died on Monday at a Manhattan hospital after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He said Max is survived by his children, Max and Libra, who “loved him very much.”

“He had a very expansive mind. As much as the Beatles provided a soundtrack for that era and for that generation, Peter visualized it, and he just exploded onto the scene in the late 1960s,” Pagnotta said. “Whatever kind of post-war optimism existed in the country, even though it was very turbulent times, Peter was able to capture that and marry it to that sort of spiritual eastern magical mystery thing, and it worked perfectly. And he believed in the mass appeal of what he was doing. He believed in making art accessible to people.”

Max was born Peter Max Finkelstein to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1937. His family fled Nazi persecution when he was still an infant and spent about a decade in Shanghai before living for several years in Israel and eventually settling in Brooklyn in 1953.

After high school, Max began his formal training at the Art Students League of New York, which also counted the major postwar artists Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly among its former students. Their evolution from abstract expressionism into pop art helped usher in the movement and the bright, familiar everyday imagery that Max would embrace in his joyful, kaleidoscopic works.

Max’s instantly recognizable “Be In” poster layered the word Love over a rainbow background and helped inspire “several hundred thousand hippies” to gather in New York City’s Central Park to immortalize the Summer of Love, Max’s website recalls. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

His ubiquitous “Cosmic Jumper” was a seemingly weightless figure clad in a bell-bottomed suit who soared through joyful dreamscapes saturated with bands of bright colors. The character was featured on a 1974 postage stamp to commemorate the Spokane World’s Fair.

In the 1970s, the federal government hired Max to design a series of “Welcome to the U.S.” signs for entry points along the Canadian and Mexican borders. His trippy designs, drenched in bright pink, blue, and yellow, initially ended up in storage after some officials questioned their psychedelic vibe.