Artist Peter Max to appear at Woodfield gallery

For an artist as famous as Peter Max, the work can get so tied to an era it can become binding. Yet Max, if still best known for his "cosmic" art of the '60s, found a way out of the trap of celebrity and back into his own art in the '70s, and he's been painting successfully in divergent styles ever since, right up through his recent prints of President Barack Obama, one of six U.S. presidents he's painted for.

Max brings the vast array of his art to the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg this weekend with an appearance at the Wentworth Gallery.

Looking back on it, talking on the phone from his home in New York City, Max still seemed a little amazed at the sensation he created in the first place in the mid-'60s. "I had to just accept it," he said. "I was stunned."

Max was just another struggling artist and designer trying to find work in Manhattan in the early '60s. Formally trained in the realist tradition in Paris and New York, his work could be very good, like an early album cover for boogie pianist Meade Lux Lewis on Riverside Records, but it wasn't all that distinctive.

"For six months I was running around nearly in tears because I couldn't get any work with the realism, because nobody was buying it," Max recalled. How could an aspiring artist hope to replace photographs shot by the likes of Richard Avedon or Irving Penn?

"They didn't need anybody rendering anything in realism," he said, "and I just didn't know what to do, where to go. I was naive. And once this style hit, everybody in the world called me."

"This style" came out of his youthful enthusiasms, including a passion for astronomy. Max had led a varied and globe-trotting childhood. Born in Germany in 1937 as Peter Max Finkelstein, his family left for China shortly before World War II. They made their way to the newly formed Israel after the war, then Paris and on to New York. Once on his own, Max might have been doing realism to find work, but what he had going on in idle moments were more fanciful, fluid, colorful drawings projecting vivid figures against blue skies full of sunlight, stars and planets.

"I was shy about it," he said. "I was doing it on the side, to entertain my love of astronomy."

When one art director caught a glimpse of his pieces, however, they made an immediate impression. That led to 14 project assignments, which led instantly to another 27, and it exploded exponentially.

Max's work, along with Milton Glaser's psychedelic profile portrait of Bob Dylan, came to epitomize the '60s. In a matter of months, he was on the cover of Life magazine. He worked on the basic look of the feature film "Yellow Submarine," but like the Beatles themselves he largely farmed out his work on the project, turning over the animation design to Heinz Edelmann, "the Peter Max of Germany."

By the early '70s, he had dozens of licensing deals, from General Electric clocks to T-shirts, bedsheets and the like. And just when it seemed he could have stayed in the '60s forever marketing his lucrative iconic images, he went back to work.

"I always said to myself, 'Look, I'm an artist,'" he said, "and then, when I realized I was doing too much of this licensing stuff, at the height of it, I gave it up."

His work has earned him almost 80 museum shows, including one in the mid-1980s at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg that attracted the largest attendance of any art exhibit in Russian history. "They all had flowers in their hair, like hippies," he recalled of the opening. "And they would say to me two words - peace, Beatles, Beatles, peace."

Yet, make no mistake, if he's been eternally bound to the '60s, there's been a lot more to his body of work than just that.

"I was identified a lot with the middle '60s when I first hit the scene," he said. "But as soon as my new stuff came out in the middle '70s then I got identified with that. On and on, I'm always inventing and reinventing stuff."

Some things have remained consistent, such as his brash palette. "I had this amazing skill and love and innate knowledge of color," he said. "I don't know where it came from."

Other persistent themes were environmentalism and his abiding fondness for and loyalty to his adopted nation, reflected in series of works on the flag and the Statue of Liberty, all meant to capture "the absolute dynamic aspect of this crazy, amazing, fantastically creative country," he said.

Max did posters for charity after Sept. 11 and worked on the "American Heroes" project: 356 portraits of firefighters killed in 2001. While music has been a constant - he's been the official artist of the Grammy Awards six times - he's also done a lot of sports, including five Super Bowls and the World Series. He's now the official artist of the New York Yankees - with a gallery at Yankee Stadium - and he's overlapped love of sports and country with an Olympic mural at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City and as the official artist of the 2006 U.S. Winter Olympic Team.

Asked if he'd be open to do the 2016 Olympics if Chicago gets them, he said right away, "For sure!" For a man who works daily at his studio from noon to 9 because "I hate to leave, and I can't wait to get there," he'd have time for another pet project.

If you go

Who: Peter Max

What: Selling and signing paintings, prints and books

When: 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 18

Where: Wentworth Gallery, Woodfield Mall, Schaumburg

Phone: (847) 995-1190