Peter Max

The U.S. Expo 74 stamp design is an iconic image of the fair. German-American artist Peter Max designed this stamp, which features his recurring character, the “Cosmic Runner" or "Cosmic Jumper," traveling through a colorful world. The face in profile on the right is dubbed "the Smiling Sage."

The stamp was introduced to the world in a ceremony at the Spokane Post Office on April 18, 1974. Commemorative and souvenir versions of the stamp were available, including multiple first day of issue envelope versions and an enamel pin version.

Peter Max rose to prominence in the 1960s for his psychedelic counter-cultural imagery. He appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine in 1969, with the headline: “Peter Max: Portrait of the artist as a very rich man.” Although he was not the first artist to work in this style, he became one of the best-known, thanks to media appearances and savvy corporate partnerships.

The yellow pamphlet below, included with some first-day covers of the Expo ‘74 stamp, offers a brief biography of Peter Max that emphasizes his interest in environmentalism. It also promotes the fair, presumably for the benefit of philatelists who were interested in the stamp but unfamiliar with the Expo. The biography in this pamphlet includes a controversial claim: "Peter collaborated with the Beatles to produce the fantastic graphics for the musical motion picture phenomenon, the Yellow Submarine."

*The Fab Four and the Blue Meanie in a screenshot from Yellow Submarine.*

You can certainly see elements in Yellow Submarine's art style that also appear in Peter Max's style, such as the radiating beams in the background of many shots, a color palette so vivid that it clashes, and characters stylized with small heads and exaggeratedly wide pants and large shoes. (This is in contrast to the Disney style of animation, which often cheats the heads of animated characters larger than real human proportions and tends to make the feet small on most models.) It made intrinsic sense to a lot of people, then and now: “Peter Max makes art like this, therefore, Peter Max made this art.”

This is the point in the story when we introduce Heinz Edelmann, a.k.a. "the Peter Max of Germany." (Although Peter Max was born in Berlin, he primarily worked and lived in America during his art career.) This image is an illustration that Edelmann created in 1970 for a children's book about a moon voyage. The inks are a little looser, but if you're familiar with Yellow Submarine, I suspect this looks very familiar. That's because Heinz Edelmann was the actual art director of Yellow Submarine.

*An illustration from Heinz Edelmann’s “Andromedar SR1” (1970).*

So how did the misconception come about? Did audiences and reporters make the embarrassing mistake of mixing up a psychedelic German-American artist with a psychedelic Czech-German artist? Well, possibly. But the biggest source of the claim that Peter Max worked on Yellow Submarine was, for many decades, Peter Max himself.

An interviewer in 2012 prompted Max with, “Many people assume that you did the work for The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine…” to which Max replied, “Well, I actually did. I was very, very close friends with the Beatles, and they were going to make a movie. I remember getting a call from John, saying they wanted me to do it. So I designed it. And then I flew to Europe and found out that they wanted me to stay in Europe for seventeen months and make the whole film. I said, ‘I can’t.’ I had a fifteen-month-old boy and my wife was going to give birth to another kid in four or five months, and I was not going to stay away for a whole year. There was an artist in Europe, in Düsseldorf, Germany, who called himself ‘the German Peter Max.’ I called him and gave him the opportunity to do the film. When I met him and he gave me his card that said ‘Heinz Edelmann: The German Peter Max,’ I said, ‘Heinz, I don’t mind if you copy my work, but please don’t copy it exactly and please take my name off your card.’”

The interviewer, clearly familiar with the controversy, followed this up by saying, “[Heinz Edelmann]’s supporters and people involved with him and the film have denied that he copied you and say it’s the reverse,” to which Max replied, “Oh, I was doing this kind of stuff since you were born [1962], and the Yellow Submarine stuff didn’t happen until the late sixties. I am still very good friends with Ringo and Paul; Ringo and I speak every few weeks on the phone, and when he’s in New York, he comes and visits. Paul, the same thing. I miss John and George. George and I had one thing very much in common - we both loved yoga. He had the Maharishi and I had Swami Satchidananda.” He also contributed to the confusion by autographing various items associated with Yellow Submarine, like records and animation cels.

*This animation cell from Yellow Submarine was autographed by Peter Max and* *sold for $1,302 in 2013.*

Even in Peter Max's own version of events, his involvement was only at a very preliminary stage of Yellow Submarine's development. His claims are usually framed in very general terms: "designed it," "collaborated with," or "did the work." It is possible that he offered some concept art during his initial conversations with the Beatles, but all parties agree that Max was not involved in the actual animation of the film. However, the evidence suggests that he was not even involved at the early stage that he claimed. The making of Yellow Submarine has been documented extensively, and the evolution of Edelmann's preliminary sketches into animation-friendly character designs is easy to track. If somebody had verifiable Peter Max sketches of Yellow Submarine concepts, I believe they not only would have turned up by now, but they would have been sold at auction for breathtaking prices.

*Pencil sketches and painted sketches of Heinz Edelmann’s concept art for Yellow Submarine.*

In a 2018 interview, Peter Max finally walked back his claims about the art of Yellow Submarine: “The art for ‘Yellow Submarine’ was created by German artist Heinz Edelmann. It was similar in some ways to my ‘60s art but even more similar to Pushpin Studios artists Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast and John Alcorn. My work in the ‘60s was more related to the cosmos - stars, galazies, planets, Cosmic Jumpers and flyers in swirling spacescapes. Their subjects were more flowers and rainbows.'' The article politely referred to this retraction as "clear[ing] the cosmic dust,” and the interviewer did not press Max about why he had previously taken credit for Yellow Submarine.

We don’t know the exact reasons that Peter Max finally relinquished his claim on Yellow Submarine. A 2018 interview with a Yellow Submarine animator who worked under Edelmann may provide some insight: “Oh, Peter Max. Lots of people were creating psychedelic art. He was good but believed the style belonged to him. So, he claimed he designed Yellow Submarine. The studio talked with him. He stopped.”

Later developments gave the 2018 retraction additional context. A New York Times article in May of 2019 revealed that Max's cognitive function had been in severe decline for several years, and that the commercial juggernaut of Peter Max art had been proceeding largely without his knowledge or involvement. “By 2012, Mr. Max’s mental faculties were beginning to wane. He would sign books, squiggle designs on cocktail napkins for dinner companions, or hold a brush and put some paint on canvas for public appearances, but he struggled to truly create. In the next couple of years, Mr. Max stopped painting almost entirely.”

All evidence suggests that Peter Max did not meaningfully contribute to Yellow Submarine, other than through his contributions to psychedelic art in general. I can’t support his misrepresentations about this topic, and I wish he had not felt the need to claim credit for the work of another, lesser-known artist. He should have known better and done better. But setting aside that issue, his contributions to the art world and Expo ‘74 are worth celebrating. He gave us a design for Expo’s official stamp that was playful, vivid, and memorable. He also did four additional pieces based on the Expo themes. Each are unique, colorful, whimsical, and purely Peter Max.