After a single glance, one does not soon forget the bold colors, brushstrokes, and compositions of artist Peter Max. For decades, his artistic expressions have overflowed his numerous museum and gallery exhibitions to shape pop culture—from an environmental U.S. postage stamp to the fuselage of a Continental Airlines plane to the hull of a giant Norwegian Lines cruise ship.
But there’s more going on here than Peter’s unique commissions. If you look across Peter Max’s oeuvre you will discover an enormously diverse body of work in all mediums—from the exquisite line work of his drawings to his masterful command of paint on canvas in all genres, from realism to pop to abstraction. Of course I am biased, but for me, I have always been enamored of Peter’s artful depictions of cosmic objects and phenomena, with his iconic 1960s-clad characters flying or effortlessly leaping across planets, stars, and galaxies.
When I finally met Peter at an event hosted by the Hayden Planetarium, I was delighted to learn that the subject of space was not just an adornment to his art but also a passion as great as my own. We both have been fascinated by space since early childhood, and I was enchanted by Peter’s recounted discoveries of space as a young boy growing up in China, and as a teenager in Israel, where he attended an evening course on the universe at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
Shortly after we first met, Peter invited me to his studio, not far from the planetarium itself, where he showed me the posters he had created for NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, as well as his portraits of astronauts John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, and Anousheh Ansari, the first private female space explorer. Over lunch, we got lost in a two-hour emotionally charged conversation about the marvels of our universe.
In modern times, a scientist can communicate with the public via books, radio interviews, television documentaries, and, of course, the Internet. But one cannot assert that the messages have been absorbed into the hearts and minds of the public until artists embrace the themes. Only then has science entered culture, having become the artist’s muse.
I only get to talk about this stuff. But Peter has managed to capture the soul of the cosmos on canvas and posters. You may now understand why the title for his memoir can be none other than The Universe of Peter Max.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Director of the Hayden Planetarium, New York City, and author of Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier