Hippie Icon Peter Max Maximizes TV, Web Exposure

Peter Max loves trivia. “Do you know how many people watch QVC?” he asks.

The ‘60s pop artist is standing over a table of Woodstock 99 posters that he will hawk on the cable shopping channel that evening. With one of those fat black markers that make a room reek, he starts swishing “Max” across 100 of them.

“About 3.5 million people watch QVC.” He’s already signed 10 posters. “You know how big that is? That’s the population of all of Manhattan.” He’s up to No. 30. “That’s the size of 70 stadiums.” He’s reaching the bottom of the heap. “But you’re not a speck of dust up on the stage. You’re the big picture.”

How long does it take Max to turn a pile of posters into $20,000 worth of merchandise? One minute.

That’s also how long it takes to flip to QVC to buy one of those posters for $200. That’s how long it takes to log onto EBay and bid $7.99 on a vintage Peter Max ladies’ size 10 bathing suit, or $23,000 for an original Statue of Liberty painting. That’s how fast you’ll be able to click over to Petermax.com for a $125 signed Earth Day 1995 T-shirt.

At 62, Peter Max, the prolific hippie icon long pooh-poohed by art purists as a commercial sellout, is being virtually reincarnated by the Internet and cable TV.

“Everybody is starving for content,” he says. “And I have more content than anyone on planet Earth--more than Disney, more than Viacom. . . .”

The only thing better than having a dot-com these days is having the material to plaster on Web sites and cable channels to draw eyeballs--and, ultimately, advertising dollars. Content, after all, is what propelled Martha Stewart into a thriving publicly traded company. It’s why America Online wants Time Warner.

“I want to reach 100 million people in one fell swoop,” he says. “I want to shift with the way the world is going.”

Max will launch his own online business later this month to flood “planet Earth” with tons of pent-up work that until very recently trickled from tiny galleries and flea markets. If all goes according to plan, he will sell shares of his company to the public next year and pour part of the proceeds into Peter Max stores and a syndicated television show.

“Max demonstrates the power of the Internet to pump up the value of old nostalgia and conventional artwork,” said David Shayt, cultural director of the National Museum of American History. “He is once again becoming a force to be reckoned with.”

At the heart of his lucrative rebirth are thousands of images that Max has been producing at warp speed for 30 years--3,000 hearts, 5,000 silhouettes of ladies, Snow White, Gorbys galore, the 1993 Middle East peace accord signing at the White House.

“What do you want to see?” the painter asks, ripping through boxes full of negatives that cram his studio. “President Clinton? Picasso? Umbrella Man?”

Fans will be able to download images or shop from a line of merchandise; collectors will have a place to trade old Peter Max bluejeans, clocks, posters, chessboards.

Cameras will beam Max live from his studio onto computer screens, so cyber-surfers can command him to paint--for a price. “If they have a hand in it,” says Bruce Brownstein, a vice president at EBay, “the artwork will become even more valuable.”

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Back before QVC and MTV, Max landed his bold patterns on everything from jeans to wristwatches. From 1967 to 1971, he had 72 product lines generating $1.1 billion. In the late 1960s, his “Save the Planet, Use Mass Transit” posters were plastered on 68,000 New York City buses.

“I used to be bigger than Calvin or Ralph,” he says wistfully. “You couldn’t leave your house without eating out of a Peter Max bowl, putting on Peter Max stockings, scribbling on your Peter Max pad.”

After the divorce from the mother of his two children, Max virtually disappeared for a good 20 years.

He resurfaced with a bang in November 1997, arrested on charges of tax fraud, allegedly attempting to barter his art for property between 1986 and 1992. Max entered a work-release program and served penance by helping inner-city elementary school children on art projects throughout New York.

He does not want to talk about this chapter. “I’m not a nostalgic guy,” he says. “I’m always looking forward.”

Luckily for him, though, the rest of the world is looking back. “As we enter the new millennium, as one generation yields to the next, there’s a sense of loss,” Shayt said. “Everyone is re-exploring the whole mystery about the ‘60s, the upheaval.”

In California during the last few years, Max’s artwork has continued to lure private collectors and to be featured in gallery and museum shows. He also appeared at the Ronald Regan Presidential Library in November to help 18 Simi Valley-area students paint a computer-generated vinyl mural commemorating the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which once divided Max’s hometown.

Max himself is as trim and energetic as he was in his heyday. His dark hair is thinning and combed close to his head. When he first appeared on QVC last year, he sold hundreds of signed posters on the spot for $200 each. Now he’s on the channel once a month, typically making $1 million in two hours. It’s no wonder he never misses a pitch. “Did you know QVC stands for Quality Viewing Channel?” he asks.

Since his first QVC show, gallery sales have quadrupled, said Allan Fingerhut, whose four galleries in California and Minnesota sell millions of dollars’ worth of Max art annually.

“People see him on TV, then they remember they had a lunch bucket, poster from the ‘60s,” he says. “And they come to a show.”

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The cosmic thought swept over Peter Max last year when he stumbled into EBay, where, at any given time, more than 250 of his works are being auctioned.

“Peter Max is the single biggest seller on EBay behind Beanie Babies,” said EBay’s Brownstein. “And that’s with him doing absolutely nothing.”

Max discovered psychedelic scarves, socks--even the old bus posters, swiped decades ago by overzealous fans. “I kept clicking and there was a Love poster that I printed in ’67 or ’68 for 6 cents. It had a torn corner and a coffee smudge. It was selling for $350. I have 200 here in perfect condition --and I can sign them.”

So, Max started digging into the closets at his headquarters--a 45,000-square-foot spread on four prime Upper West Side stories, teeming with 90 employees and packed with artwork.

One room is full of the books of sophisticated doodles he churns out frenetically. “It’s 3:40 and I’ve done, like, 95 paintings today,” he says.

It’s as if Max is printing his own money. “My markup is, like, 200 times what it costs me to produce,” he says. “Generally, a profitable product is marked up maybe two times.”

Investment bankers who have pored over his work say that if it’s properly mined--that is, carefully licensed and sold repeatedly to pay-as-you-go cyber-shoppers--it could generate more than $1 billion in revenues. So Max expects to easily raise $200 million to $300 million through his public offering next year.

Part of that money will be used to open 200 stores by 2002. They will contain original art in a “neo pop shop,” a cosmic cafe, cyber art center, video wall, multimedia space.

Old-fashioned artists are sure to be aghast about the commercial explosion. Max doesn’t care.

“The Internet, TV, canvas--it’s all a medium. Art is no longer just pigments, paper, etching. To be an artist [today], you need to be, you know, cyber-savvy. If Matisse and Van Gogh were alive today, they’d want to be on MTV.”

The Internet, as Max sees it, is simply the latest evolution of art.

“The Internet is the most amusing and most amazing of all the phases,” Max says. “It’s almost a world you enter, like a real estate that’s in your mind. Amazon, Yahoo--they’re real estate barons in a cyber-world, which is a digital imaginative space that exists in all these little digital addresses. It will bring the whole world into anyone’s window.”