When artist Peter Max was asked to capture the essence of Arthur Ashe Stadium, 20 years after delivering a rendering for his debut, he quickly spotted a new test of his talent: how to convey the addition in 2016 a retractable roof.
For over five decades, Max has produced unique expressionistic and colorful versions of subjects as varied as Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, John Glenn, Taylor Swift, world Cup and the United States Open tennis tournament.
But it’s not easy to depict a stadium in a way that animate posters, T-shirts, magnets, luggage tags and even ticket stubs. And for Max, there was the added pressure of living up to the 1997 version, which for many tennis fans had become the best representative of the energy and passion of the last Grand Slam tournament of each year, the Open.
Even in the age of smartphones and Instagram, where anyone can artfully reskin dozens of selfies with tones and filters, the United States Tennis Association annually hires an official theme artist for its Open, in the hope of capturing the individuality of the event with a more outdated medium: painting.
“The US Open challenged me to give energy to the stadium rather than to a player,” Max wrote in an email from his Upper West Side studio. “In all sports it is about movement, energy and color, expressed through my brushstrokes. »
It may seem like a strange idea, marrying the sweat and dirt of professional sports with museum-quality artwork, but many other major sporting events, including the Super Bowl, World Series and Olympics, continue to hire an official artist to represent their events. .
Max, who turns 80 this month, has been the theme artist for five Super Bowls and dozens of other events, although he was never an athlete himself. Over the years, his brushstrokes have become as admired in the sport as Roger Federer’s groundstrokes.
“For me, sports are as much a cultural expression as musical events,” Max said in his email. “There is an elegance in the way a baseball player swings his bat and hits a home run, or in the way a tennis player swings his racket, or in a golfer hooking a golf ball. When you watch it in slow motion, it’s like a ballet.
The best sports tables have resonated for years. LeRoy Nieman created unforgettable dreamlike images of dashing Olympic sprinters, punchers and racing thoroughbreds. Norman Rockwell breathed life into rain delay. Ernie Barnes’ works are now enshrined in the Pro Football and Basketball Hall of Fame. Another artist, Daniel Moore, has been called the Michelangelo of Alabama football.
But finding the right image, which can be displayed on banners or reduced to the size of a postage stamp without losing its essence, is never easy and, in some ways, is becoming increasingly difficult.
“It’s a challenge in today’s world because it’s so immediate,” said Burton Morris, the official artist of Major League Baseball’s 2006 All-Star Game of the 2010 World Cup. and the 2016 United States Open golf tournament. “There is so much image bombardment. How do you create something new that will continue to excite and interest people? »
For the Open, this process begins almost a year before the tournament. Beth Meyer, USTA creative director, said that due to merchandising considerations, organizers must begin choosing the theme artist nearly a year in advance.
The cultural influence of Max’s first painting of Ashe Stadium remained strong enough that tournament officials thought it was time to revive the stadium. Max submitted four sketches in January and began working on the new theme in the spring.
The 1997 version, which depicted a steel blue stadium seen from the sky, in front of a blazing orange sunset, has not been radically changed. In the 2017 image, two crossed tennis rackets – much like the Wimbledon logo – hover above the stadium, which now glows with hints of purple, green and vermillion.
The rackets, Max said, “symbolized the fierce competition of the game.”
The original version is still popular enough that the tournament sells T-shirts with that image as well as the new one.
“I see people wearing both,” Meyer said. “I think sales are going very well.”
The reason, according to Morris, is that Max is the rare artist who has managed to adapt his work just enough to keep it relevant while retaining a classical core.
“Peter has been very smart in keeping his work current,” Morris said. “I think sporting events try to connect to something current and exciting. The world of sports is all about action and excitement. They need to stay connected to things that are current at the moment.
