Born in Germany, Peter Max was raised in Shanghai, China. He was raised in a pagoda-style house situated amidst a Buddhist monastery, a Sikh temple and a Viennese café. And yet, with all that richness and diversity of culture, he still had a dream of an adventure yet to come in a far-off land called America.

As a child, Peter created his own America from his imagination and comic books and radio broadcasts. He created a cast of characters and a world fueled even further by his personal experiences.

At the age of ten, Peter and his parents traveled across the vast expanse of China to a Tibetan mountain camp at the foothills of the Himalayas. Then they journeyed 9,000 feet up to a beautiful white-turreted hotel in a mountain paradise that seemed like Shangri-La.

After their return to Shanghai, the family left on another voyage of discovery around India, the continent of Africa and Israel where Peter studied art with a Viennese fauve painter. It was in Israel that young Peter developed a love and fascination for astronomy.

In 1953, Peter’s family immigrated to America after a 6-month visit to Paris. Though it was a relatively short stay, Peter enrolled in an art school and absorbed the culture and art heritage of Paris. At the age of 16, Peter realized his childhood dream and arrived in America.

After completing high school, he continued his art studies at The Art Student’s League, a renowned traditional academy across from Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. Here Peter learned the rigid disciplines of realism and developed into a realist painter.

When he left art school, Max had become fascinated with new tends in commercial illustration and graphic arts from America as well as Europe and Japan. He decided to try his hand at it and within a short time, he won awards for album covers and book jackets, which combined his own brand of realism with graphic art techniques.