Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 8, 2022

Few artists are as evocative of a time and place as Peter Max (nee Tuvia Finkelstein, b. 1937), who is renowned for his use of psychedelic shapes and vibrant color palettes and whose oeuvre is strongly identified as a popular part of the counterculture during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Max is also known for his development of new printing techniques that facilitated four-color reproduction on products and merchandise and an inexpensive printing process that permitted him to produce posters very cheaply in full color. One of his first poster creations, the iconic Love poster, sold nearly a million copies at only $2 each, was seen on the walls of college dorms all across America, and is credited with capturing the essence of 60s youth culture and hippie movement. From serving as the Official Artist of the 1994 World Cup; creating works for the Grammy Awards, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Super Bowl; painting a Continental Airlines 777 plane; and being commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service to create the first 10 postage stamp to commemorate the Expo 74 Worlds Fair in Spokane. His art became a household name and his projects have always garnered enormous media attention.

Max often employs patriotic American icons and symbols in his artwork, including specifically the Statue of Liberty, and his creations include images of the worlds best-loved celebrities, athletes, sporting events, politicians and other pop culture subjects, including seven American presidents. Some of his most creative and original work may have its roots in his synesthesia (the ability to hear colors and see sounds in his mind).

Maxs father, Jacob, was raised in a chassidic family and was religiously observant, and his mother, Salla, was an artistic fashion designer who was less so. The couple met in Berlin, where they were married and where Peter was born. After his parents fled Nazi Germany to escape the Holocaust, leaving behind his maternal grandmother and 10 of his fathers siblings, all murdered by the Nazis, Peter Max Finkelstein spent most his childhood in Shanghai with the Jewish community in Hongkou (1938-1949).

The family was very Jewishly active there. Max attended the Kadoorie School, a Talmud Torah; his father supported the local shul; and his mother was a HIAS volunteer helping newly arrived Jewish refugees adjust to their new and unfamiliar home. Maxs father owned five clothing stores, ran a successful clothing import business, and accumulated significant holdings, including homes and apartment buildings.

Shanghai was an important safe haven for Jewish refugees during the Holocaust because it was one of the few places in the world where a visa was not required. Some 23,000 European Jews found shelter there because Shanghai was then an open city with no immigration restrictions, and several Chinese diplomats issued protective passports and transit visas to Jews and others fleeing the Holocaust.

Later during the war, the occupying Japanese forces relocated the Jewish stateless refugees to an area less than a square mile in Shanghais Hongkou district, which included the community around the Ohel Moshe Synagogue. Japanese authorities progressively adopted additional restrictions, but the ghetto was not walled, the local Chinese residents did not leave, and American Jewish charities were able to provide basic necessities to the Jews of the Shanghai ghetto. After the war, many of the Jews of Shanghai including, as we will see, the Max family made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and helped to establish the State of Israel.

Maxs introduction to art began in Shanghai when he joined Chinese children drawing with multicolored chalk on cement floors. The family lived in a pagoda-style house between a Buddhist temple and a Sikh temple, from where the young Peter would watch the Buddhist monks practicing calligraphy with large bamboo brushes on large sheets of rice paper using the movements of their entire body. His mother encouraged him to develop his skills by leaving a variety of art supplies on the balconies of the pagoda.

However, his interest in art really took off when his nine-year-old Chinese nanny taught him how to hold and paint with a brush by using the movement of his wrist; taught him how to draw and joined him in using the chalk to draw the sun, the sky, and the moon in various colors; and encouraged him to create nonsense drawings to expand his artistic imagination.

Max would later describe her as like my elder sister and my first art teacher and, from the day he left Shanghai, he dreamt of returning there to find her and care for her. On October 11, 2012, he held a press conference at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum where he held up a sketch he had made of her from memory (he did not remember her name) and asked the local press and the community to help locate her. The museum curator promised to expend every effort to find her, but she was never found.

Aware of the rise of Mao Tse-Tung and the coming Chinese revolution, Israel sent a large ship to China to help evacuate the entire Jewish community. At the time, the Max family was living temporarily in Tibet, where Peter loved being up in the mountains and listening to the chants of the Tibetan monks. Upon the familys return to Shanghai, they learned that the Israeli ship with some 2,500 Jews aboard was scheduled to depart the very next day and, in less than 24 hours, the family put together the little that they could take with them and abandoned virtually everything they had accumulated during their very successful stay in China to go to Israel.

Max recalls crying on the ship taking his family to Israel, where they settled in Haifa, because he was reluctant to leave behind his Chinese nanny and the many friends he had made on the streets of Shanghai. The ship sailed to India and attempted to navigate through the Suez Canal, but they were turned back and forced to take an additional 40-50 days to circle around Africa.

The 10-year-old Max attended an Israeli school in Haifa and took art classes there. He desperately wanted to study astronomy after being awed during a visit to an observatory on Mount Carmel, so his parents took him to the Technion and succeeded in getting him into an evening astronomy class, where he became the youngest student.

Max went on to study art with Professor Hunik, an Austrian oleh and a master Impressionist, Fauvist, and New Age painter noted for his use of exaggerated colors, which later became Maxs trademark. Nonetheless, he still harbored dreams of being an astronomer and, when he finally decided on a career as an artist, a fascination with the stars and breadth and beauty of the universe became a common theme of his work and underscored his self-described Cosmic 60s period. As he put it:

Ive had a fascination for space and astronomy since I was a child and studied it when we lived in Israel . . . Somehow I could intuitively perceive the vast distances of space by visualizing immense vistas in my mind that couldnt be seen with the eye. I sketched oceans of stars, planets with strange suns, futuristic vistas and flying saucers hovering above and they became more and more prominent in my cosmic period in the late 60s.

Maxs life in Israel has also manifested itself in his art in other important ways, as evidenced by his frequent use of Jewish themes, such as the Western Wall, Israels flag; 36 Rabins (his twice chai portraits of Israels prime minister, one of which he presented to Edgar Bronfman Jr. at a 1997 UJA Federation gala); and a painting he did for the White House in honor of the Israel-Palestine peace accords, in which he depicts the (in)famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat with a beaming Clinton between them (see exhibit).

After spending a few months in Paris, where Max took classes at the Louvre, the family settled in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, after he graduated high school (1953). Max began his formal art training at the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan in 1956, studying anatomy, figure drawing and composition and, starting a small Manhattan arts studio with two friends in 1962, he worked on books and advertising earning industry-side recognition.

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Although Max, who is fluent in Hebrew, prefers not to be characterized as a Jewish artist, he remains a proud Jew. He credits the Jewish influence on his art to his late parents and to the warmth he encountered in various Jewish communities around the world: I think that my Jewish heritage shaped me as an artist most by the love and caring I got from the Jewish community in Shanghai, Israel, and later in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Nonetheless, he married two non-Jewish women; he maintains a keen interest in Hinduism and Buddhism, which likely began in Tibet; and, a great aficionado of yoga and meditation, he brought Swami Sachidananda from Paris to the U.S. (1966) and co-founded the Integral Yoga Institute with him.

A great supporter of Israel, he has performed significant pro bono work for Jewish and Israeli organizations; he says that he always responds to requests that further Israels interests as a way to honor his departed parents. Thus, for example he agreed to host at his studio the 130th birthday celebration of HIAS (2011), for which his mother had worked in Shanghai; he served as the official artist of the 2013 Salute to Israel parade in New York City; and he was named the official artist for Israels 50th anniversary in 1998 (see exhibit), about which he enthused this was the most special as it not only celebrated my own Jewish heritage, but also the time I spent there as a young boy.

Exhibited here is a vibrantly colored original artwork from my collection, an untitled, mixed media on sunburst sheet rendered by Max in his characteristic cheery, polychrome, wide-brushed kaleidoscopic style. He has highlighted a printed color image of a man running across a hilltop, which he has embellished with thick and colorful brushstrokes to both the image and surrounding areas and signed in mixed color paint.

Finally, many people are aware of the long and bitter fight fought by singer/cultural icon Britney Spears to free herself of her fathers 13-year abusive conservatorship, a battle which she finally won this year, but few know that Max remains a prisoner of just such an abusive court-appointed conservator/guardian.

When Max married his second wife, Mary, in 1997, his family and friends believed that she had married Max for his money and were deeply concerned by her precarious mental state. Their concerns were borne out when Mary petitioned the Supreme Court of the State of New York in 2015 to be appointed as her husbands guardian, which would give her full control over every aspect of his life. After reviewing evidence of Marys mistreatment and abuse of Max, the court declined to appoint her as a guardian but, to protect him from his own wife, it appointed a series of guardians, who were kind to him and permitted him to live his life freely as he chose.

However, Mary committed suicide in 2019 and, the very next day, Barbara Lissner ironically, a Holocaust restitution and estate planning attorney with no therapeutic training or experience in geriatrics became Maxs guardian. Although the law is clear that a guardian must employ the least restrictive measures in effecting the conservatorship and that the wards children must be permitted to participate in medical, financial and other critical decisions, Lissner immediately assumed control of every aspect of Maxs life to the point of absurdity.

The family alleges that she not only continues to isolate him from his friends and family, but she also determines at her whim when he may shower, what he may eat, when he can leave his home, etc. They further claim that she has committed extreme economic malfeasance, including paying herself exorbitant millions of dollars in fees for her services and continuing to deplete his considerable estate by many additional millions.

Maxs family and friends have spent years trying to free him but, to date, they have not been successful. However, the family, now represented by Spearss lawyer, still hopes that they will be able to free Max, who suffers from Alzheimers, from his involuntary isolation at the hands of strangers, restore his dignity, and allow him to be surrounded by loved ones at the end of his life.

See the rest here:

The Judaism And Zionism Of Tuvia Finkelstein (Aka Peter Max) - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

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