Psychedelic poster history: Peter Max and the Poster
Excerpted from “A History of Graphic Design”, Second Edition, by Philip B. Meggs, 1992, Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY.
Some aspects of the psychedelic poster movement were used in the wildly popular poster art of New York designer Peter Max (b. 1937). In his series of posters during the late 1960s, the Art Nouveau qualities of psychedelic poster art were combined with more accessible images and less strident colors. His most famous image, the 1970 Love graphic, combined the fluid organic line of Art Noveau with the hard, black contour of the comic book and Pop Art. In his finest work, Max experimented with images and printing techniques. The 1970 Toulouse-Lautrec poster, adapted from a book jacket designed by Max for a biography of the tragic post-Impressionist, used turn-of-the-century lettering superimposed over the hat. A photograph of a bacchanal scene is printed in the lettering using two split-fountain impressions. Cool colors are printed as halftone; the reverse of this image is then printed in warm colors for a strange graphic effect created on the printing press.
