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Peter Max’s U.S. Open Image: Variation on a Classic Theme

“The U.S. Open challenged me to give the stadium the energy rather than a player,” Max wrote in an email from his studio on the Upper West Side. “With all sports, it’s about movement, energy, and color, expressed through my brush strokes.”

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T-shirts with Peter Max’s official painting for the 2017 U.S. Open.

Credit
Christian Hansen for The New York Times

It might seem like an odd notion, marrying the sweat and dirt of professional sports with museum-quality fine art, but many major other sporting events, including the Super Bowl, World Series and Olympics, continue to hire an official artist to portray their events.

Max, who will turn 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 brush strokes have become as admired in sports as Roger Federer’s ground strokes.

“Sports to me are as much a cultural expression as music events,” Max said in his email. “There is an elegance in how a baseball player swings his bat and hits a home run, or how a tennis player swings his racket or a golfer hooks a golf ball. When you watch it in slow motion, it’s like a ballet.”

The best sports paintings resonate for years. LeRoy Nieman created unforgettably dreamlike images of dashing Olympic sprinters, knockout punches and racing thoroughbreds. Norman Rockwell breathed life into the rain delay. Works by Ernie Barnes now hang in the pro football and basketball halls of fame. Another artist, Daniel Moore, has been called the Michelangelo of Alabama football.

But finding the right image, one that can be splashed across banners or reduced to the size of a postage stamp without losing its essence, is never easy, and in some ways is getting harder.

“It’s a challenge with today’s world because it’s so immediate,” said Burton Morris, the official artist of Major League Baseball’s 2006 All-Star Game, the 2010 World Cup and the 2016 United States Open golf tournament. “There’s so much bombardment of imagery. How do you create something new that will still excite people and get people interested?”

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The artist Burton Morris’s image for the 2010 World Cup. “How do you create something new that will still excite people and get people interested?” he said.

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Burton Morris

For the Open, that process begins almost a full year before the tournament. Beth Meyer, the U.S.T.A.’s creative director, said that because of the merchandising considerations, organizers have to begin choosing the theme artist almost a year in advance.

The cultural influence of Max’s first painting of Ashe Stadium remained strong enough that tournament officials thought it was due for a revival. Max submitted four sketches in January and began working on the new theme in the spring.

The 1997 version, which depicted a steely blue stadium from an aerial viewpoint, in front of a fiery orange sunset, has not been dramatically altered. In the 2017 image, two crossed tennis rackets — not unlike the logo for Wimbledon — hover above the stadium, which now glows with hints of purple, green and vermilion.

The rackets, Max said, “symbolized the fierce competition of the game.”

The original version is still popular enough that the tournament is selling T-shirts with that image as well as with the new one.

“I see people wearing both,” Meyer said. “I think the sales are going very well.”

The reason, Morris said, is that Max is the rare artist who has managed to adapt his work just enough to keep it relevant while retaining a classic core.

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The artist Peter Max in June with the art he created for the 2017 United States Open tennis tournament and a similar image he made in 1997.

Credit
Julie Jacobson/Associated Press

“Peter has been very smart about keeping his work fresh,” Morris said. “I think sporting events try to connect with something current and exciting. The sports world is about action and excitement. They need to stay connected to things that are hot right now.”

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