Peter Max, the psychedelic pop artist whose neon-drenched canvases somehow ended up on everything from postage stamps to a cruise ship hull, has died at 87.
The news broke quietly, which is a weird way to go for a man who spent six decades screaming in magenta.
Within hours, the internet did what the internet does: split into two camps, neither of which is reading the room.
Camp one is posting tributes with the reverence usually reserved for a Supreme Court justice. "A visionary who brought color to a gray world," wrote one guy who definitely owns a lava lamp.
Camp two is reminding everyone that Max's later years got messy, with allegations of elder abuse, a conservatorship fight, and a suspiciously large pile of paintings that may or may not have been signed by a rotating cast of assistants.
Where the paint is bright and the ethics are murky.
Let's be honest about the legacy, though.
He was the visual wallpaper of the late 20th century.
His Statue of Liberty series in 1986 basically turned a monument into a merch opportunity, and America bought it by the truckload.
Ten cents of every poster went to the restoration fund, which is genuinely nice, but let's not pretend it wasn't also the greatest branding move since someone put a face on a coin.
Then there's the 1999 Woodstock anniversary poster, the 1970s "Cosmic Runner," the Beatles' Yellow Submarine stuff he was tangentially associated with until he wasn't, and roughly four million dorm room prints.
If you went to college between 1975 and 2005, you slept under a Peter Max poster and didn't even know his name.
The darker chapter is the one the obits are tiptoeing around.
In his final years, Max was reportedly in poor health, and a legal battle erupted over who controlled his affairs and his art.
Family members accused each other of everything short of stealing the last tube of titanium white.
It's the classic late-career artist tragedy: the work becomes a commodity, the commodity becomes a battlefield, and the guy who started it all becomes a logo on someone else's letterhead.
We romanticize the early stuff, ignore the uncomfortable middle, and slap his name on a nostalgia post that gets 40,000 likes.
Somewhere, a marketing intern is already pitching a "Peter Max Retrospective" that's 60 percent gift shop.
Here's the thing: Max was never trying to be profound.
He was trying to be joyful, and joy is hard to sell in a cynical age.
He made art for people who didn't go to art school, and for that, the gatekeepers never forgave him.
He was the people's psychedelic uncle, messy and overexposed and impossible to ignore.
Final Thoughts
You made a lot of money and a lot of enemies, which in America is basically the same thing.