The world according to Peter Max (and maybe R. Crumb)

 OK, so this post is supposed to take your mind off the election today....way far away from the election. But just to let you know I changed my mind and decided to watch it after all...tonight with a friend over and lots of celebratory goodies to eat and drink! Why did I change my mind? Because 1. it may be my last election to watch...and 2. it's bound to be a doozy! None that have gone before sounded this close the night before. And I realize it won't be decided tomorrow night...but I will know about my local elections (state and US Representative.) So let's par-tee!

PS: Just to answer the puzzle about a poem that starts with designated letters of a word - Thanks to GrannySue's blog - it's an acrostic!

Peter Max (born Peter Max Finkelstein, October 19, 1937) is an American artist known for using bright colors in his work. Works by Max are associated with the visual arts and culture of the 1960s, particularly psychedelic art and pop art.

The use of bright airbrushed colors, aka psychedelic colors, was part of Max's trademark. His illustrations moved into the home design market, and I even had a whole 10 foot living room wall mural which was meant to be wallpaper, but I only tacked it up. I'm glad I did because the real-estate saleswoman said it wouldn't help me sell the house. Actually it was mainly a cartoon in black and white, with just a bit that was the bright colors.

The United States Postal Service commissioned Max to create the 10-cent postage stamp to commemorate the Expo '74 World's Fair in Spokane, Washington, and Max drew a colorful psychedelic scene with a "Cosmic Jumper" and a "Smiling Sage" against a backdrop of a cloud, sun rays and a ship at sea on the theme of "Preserve the Environment." (Illustration below)

According to The New York Times, "His DayGlo-inflected posters became wallpaper for the turn on, tune in, drop out generation."

Max has been the official artist for many major events, including the 1994 World Cup, the Grammy Awards, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Super Bowl and others. In 2000, Max designed the paint scheme Dale Earnhardt drove at the Winston all-star race, deviating from Earnhardt's trademark black car. He was also the Official Artist of the 2000 World Series, the "Subway Series" between the New York Yankees and the New York Mets.

Max first painted Taylor Swift's portrait as a gift to the singer for her Grammy-winning albums Fearless and Speak Now, and has recently painted new portraits of Taylor Swift to commemorate her worldwide success.

In 1997, Max was indicted by a grand jury in United States District Court for federal income tax evasion and pled guilty in the Southern District of New York. In exchange for his plea bargain Max received a felony conviction and was sentenced to a term of two months of incarceration in a prison operated by Federal Bureau of Prisons overseen by the United States Department of Justice.

In 2019, The New York Times published an investigative journalism piece on Max's current state, revealing that he is suffering from advanced dementia, that he is now often unaware of his identity and his surroundings, and that his deteriorated mental state has been exploited in a massive art fraud scheme dating back to at least 2015.

And another tidbit of legal efforts against Max was also in 2019, when the estate of Louis Gottlieb filed a civil lawsuit in New York Supreme Court against Peter Max, and the estate of Peter Max’s late wife, Mary Max. The suit alleged that Peter and Mary Max had embezzled $4,600,000 from the $11,000,000 Gottlieb trust while the trust’s grantor, Louis Gottlieb was suffering from dementia.

Max is an environmentalist, vegan and supporter of human and animal rights. In 2002, Max contributed to rescue efforts for Cincinnati Freedom, a cow that escaped from an Ohio slaughterhouse. The cow jumped over a six-foot fence while the slaughterhouse workers were on break and eluded capture for eleven days. Max donated $180,000 worth of his art to benefit the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, part of a chain of events that finally led to the cow being sent to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, a permanent home where the cow remained for the rest of her life.

Max lives in New York City and has two adult children, Adam Cosmo Max and Libra Astro Max. Max has developed advanced dementia, largely the result of Alzheimer's disease. There is controversy concerning the guardianship Max is presently under. For some years his daughter has worked to revise the guardianship.

Source: Wikipedia

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And then there's R. Crumb's Keep on Truckin'

Did Peter Max borrow the wide legged pants (bell bottoms) from fellow cartoonist, R. Crumb, though they were contemporaries?  I think Max was just depicting the bell bottoms with a foot which was a regular size to the body, while Crumb expanded the feet with the leg even out of proportion. I know because several times I've drawn cartoon-style images with that proportion. It brings the viewer down to the ground level!

Robert Crumb aka R. Crumb, born August 30, 1943, founder of Zap Comix and the creator of characters and comic strips such as Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Keep On Truckin'.

Keep on Trucking song by  Grateful Dead, with R. Crumb’s underground comic characters. “Mr. Natural had a bunch of sayings. One of them was ‘Keep on Truckin’, I'm also aware that Mr. Natural appeared on various LSD products.

Wikipedia gives us this background:

Robert Dennis Crumb - born August 30, 1943 is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.

Crumb contributed to many of the seminal works of the underground comix movement in the 1960s, including being a founder of the first successful underground comix publication, Zap Comix, contributing to all 16 issues. He was additionally contributing to the East Village Other and many other publications... During this time, inspired by psychedelics and cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s, he introduced a wide variety of characters that became extremely popular, including countercultural icons Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and the images from his Keep On Truckin' strip.  Sexual themes abounded in all these projects, often shading into scatological and pornographic comics.

Much of his work appeared in a magazine he founded, Weirdo (1981–1993), which was one of the most prominent publications of the alternative comics era. 

In 1991 Crumb was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and in 1994 the Terry Zwigoff film Crumb explored his artistic career and personal life. He was married to cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, with whom he frequently collaborated. Their daughter Sophie Crumb has also followed a cartooning career.

The Crumbs moved into a house in Sauve (Gard, southern France) in 1991, which is said to have been financed by the sale of six Crumb sketchbooks. The documentary Crumb, directed by Terry Zwigoff, appeared in 1994—a project on which Zwigoff had been working since 1985.^[28] The film won several major critical accolades.

As told by Crumb in his biographical film, his artwork was very conventional and traditional in the beginning. His earlier work shows this more restrained style. In Crumb's own words, it was a lengthy drug trip on LSD that "left him fuzzy for two months" and led to him adopting the surrealistic, psychedelic style for which he has become known.

Crumb remains a prominent figure, as both artist and influence, within the alternative comics milieu. He is hailed as a genius by such comic book talents as Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, and Chris Ware. In the fall of 2008, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia hosted a major exhibition of his work, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Times and in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In the Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi (1983), the name (and aspects of the appearance) of the character Salacious B. Crumb are derived from, and are an homage to, Crumb.

In 2005 Crumb brought legal action against Amazon.com after their website used a version of his widely recognizable "Keep On Truckin'" character. The case was expected to be settled out of court.

Crumb has frequently been the target of criticism due to his recurring themes of graphic sexual and violent abuse of women.  Crumb himself has frequently admitted his insecurity and hostility in relation to women.

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Sharing with Monday Murals...these two artists are known for other media, but I did have a Peter Max mural in my living room for a while.

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North Carolina had 51% of its voters vote in early voting...so today, I do hope the other 50% show up at the polls. Source WLOS TV

I did add my comment to the WLOS Facebook posting (who knows how long it will be available)...as follows:

The facts:

" New voters who were too young eight years ago to hear the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, have been hearing it on TikTok lately, as younger users record their reactions to it and call out their older male relatives for voting for anyone who would talk as Trump did.

“I moved on her, and I failed,” Trump says in the tape. “I’ll admit it. I did try and f*ck her…. I moved on her like a b*tch, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married,” Trump said. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the p*ssy. You can do anything,” he said."

Heather Cox Richardson

Me: And thus we wore "pussy hats" in the women's marches that came out of his election.

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Reality check.

Today's quote:

Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them. 

-Lord Chesterfield, statesman and writer (1694-1773)