Peter Max , the German American artist who turned psychedelic color into a pop culture language, died Monday, September 14, 2026, at a Manhattan hospital. Max was 88, and his death was confirmed by longtime friend and spokesperson Michael Pagnotta, who said the artist had been living with Alzheimer’s disease. Max became one of the most recognizable visual artists of the late 1960s through rainbow saturated posters, cosmic figures, and portraits of cultural figures including Bob Dylan , Ringo Starr , Mick Jagger , Barack Obama, and Taylor Swift. His work made the era’s optimism feel tangible, even as the country was navigating intense political and social upheaval. How Peter Max Made Psychedelia Mainstream Max was born Peter Max Finkelstein in Berlin in 1937 to Jewish parents who fled Nazi persecution when he was an infant. His family lived in Shanghai for roughly a decade, spent several years in Israel, and moved to Brooklyn in 1953, where Max later studied at the Art Students League of New York alongside the artistic tradition associated with Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. His iconic Be In poster placed the word Love over a rainbow backdrop and became connected to the gatherings that brought hundreds of thousands of hippies to New York’s Central Park during the Summer of Love. Max’s Cosmic Jumper, a floating figure in a bell bottom suit, later appeared on a 1974 postage stamp for the Spokane World’s Fair, while the federal government commissioned his bright Welcome to the U.S. signs for border entry points along Canada and Mexico. Pagnotta said Max believed art should reach ordinary people, not remain locked inside galleries. Max is survived by his children, Adam and Libra, who Pagnotta said loved their father very much.