Money let Mr. Max indulge his eccentricities. After he divorced his first wife, Elizabeth Nance, in 1976, a staircase in his duplex connected two apartments so that she and their two children, Adam Cosmo and Libra Astro, could live downstairs. Mr. Max went on to have dalliances with Rosie Vela, a model, and Tina Louise, who played Ginger on “Gilligan’s Island.” In 1996, on a Manhattan sidewalk, Mr. Max spotted Mary Baldwin, a blond pixie with a Mia Farrow haircut, some 30 years his junior. He walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Peter Max, and I’ve been painting your profile my entire life.” They married a year later, officiated by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
By then, critics were dismissing Mr. Max as more artsy than artist, more concerned with commercial viability than creating museum-grade masterpieces. Mr. Max had a knack for the squishy business of art; he used to joke that “the difference between a $10,000 painting and a $20,000 painting is a couple inches of canvas,” according to a business associate who heard Mr. Max say this. In 1997, his looseness with money went too far, and he pleaded guilty to hiding $1.1 million in income from the I.R.S. Struggling financially, Mr. Max expanded a partnership with an organization called Park West Gallery.
Before founding the gallery in 1969, Albert Scaglione taught mechanical engineering at Wayne State University. Today he boasts that Park West is the world’s largest private art gallery, one that has sold 10 million works for billions of dollars. The majority of its revenue comes from boozy auctions held on cruise ships — and on the water, nobody sells like Mr. Max. One participant in a 2003 sales training session recalled Mr. Scaglione handing out two books: the Bible and “The Art of Peter Max.” (Through a lawyer, Mr. Scaglione said this did not happen.)
For the high-end clientele of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, Peter Max hardly registers. But for the 24 million people who take a cruise each year, Mr. Max is a star. This is an alternate, at-sea universe in which his works are the pinnacle of sophisticated collecting. Maxes can be found in Park West showrooms on all of the major cruise lines, including Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian. They promote the Park West auctions as an exhilarating onboard activity with complimentary Champagne — and take a cut of as much as 40 percent of sales, according to industry analysts. Norwegian has an entire Peter Max-themed ship, whose hull is dominated by his sunny Statue of Liberty and New York skyline.
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