Peter Max, the artist America credits for the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, has died at 88
The psychedelic pop artist died on Thursday, and the first thing the internet did was connect him to a Beatles cartoon he had nothing to do with. He spent much of his life encouraging that, and the man who actually drew it has been dead since 2009.
Peter Max died on Thursday at 88, and within the hour the search traffic around his name did something telling: the query climbing fastest alongside it was Yellow Submarine. Google Trends logged "peter max yellow submarine" as a breakout term while the obituaries were still going up.
He did not make that film. The Beatles' 1968 feature was designed by Heinz Edelmann, a German illustrator who took the job after Max's psychedelic poster work had already made his palette the default shorthand for 1967. The two styles were close enough that the public filed them under one name, and the name that stuck was the American one.
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The man who actually drew the Blue Meanies
Edelmann built the film's look, and the Blue Meanies were his invention — they are not in the song, and they were not in the script when production started. Bob Balser, the film's director of animation, put it plainly: "Probably the most important person on the film was Heinz Edelmann who came up with the concept of the Blue Meanies that didn't exist when the film started."
Edelmann's own account of designing them is less grand. "At the time, I was heavily into monsters and I had just sat down for an afternoon and did them all," he said. They were meant to be red. An assistant coloured them blue, and the name followed the colour.
Edelmann died in 2009 at 75, and most of the obituaries that ran for him had to open by explaining that no, the Beatles cartoon was not by the other man.
Max spent decades on the wrong side of that story
He was not a passive victim of the confusion. Max claimed repeatedly, in versions that shifted over the years, that he had worked on the picture. The production team denied it every time. It is a strange thing to keep reaching for when the rest of the résumé is this full:
- 1967 — the flyers for the Central Park Be-In.
- 5 September 1969 — the cover of Life.
- 1974 — the first "Preserve the Environment" US postage stamp, for Expo '74.
- 1989 — the sleeve of Aretha Franklin's Through the Storm.
Add the official-artist commissions: the 1994 World Cup, the Grammys, the 2000 World Series. Born in Berlin in 1937, he trained at the Art Students League and had his own studio by 1962. Almost none of that is what people typed into a search box on Thursday.
A style can outrun the person who made it. Edelmann's drawings became "Peter Max art" in the public mind, and Max seems to have believed the attribution himself often enough to repeat it in interviews.
The animation historians have been correcting this for fifty years without much effect. Judging by what people were searching on the day he died, they have another fifty ahead of them.
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