Max
Springer's first showing was in 1965 at the Jack Carr Gallery in Pasadena,
California. At age 11 it was clear that he had a strong predisposition to
art and composition.
Through
the end of the sixties and throughout the 1970's, Max participated in many
academic shows and State sponsored shows for young artists. He exhibited
at San Gabriel High School, East Los Angeles Junior College, Pasadena City
College, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (attended by scholarship
in 1971-'72), and Mount Palomar College, San Diego.
At
the crescendo of his college days, abstraction in art led him to a new appreciation
of music, which netted Max scholarships to study piano and electronic music
privately under the tutelage of Zina Louie and Vernon Overmeyer.
The
combination of the Arts became important for Max in the late 1970's and
early 1980's. Music and painting were integrated more and more by Mr. Springer
during shows in San Diego starting in 1980. The Club (San Diego) sponsored
Mr. Springer's show "Night Dreams", which brought painting into
the club scene of San Diego for the first time.
In
1981 and 1982 Max helped C.O.M.B.O. (the main San Diego Arts funding project)
by volunteering his graphic work for their posters. In 1982 Max brought
his knowledge of the media to bear fruit by staging "Drag Queens and
other Things" at the Parker-Mumford Gallery. This show brought together
painting, cross-dressers, San Diego press, and the public, which would normally
disdain any such contact with 'Bohemians'. Ten minutes of prime time news
coverage, a page in the Union Tribune comparing his paintings to works by
Edward Hopper and Dianne Arbus, and the purchase of the original painting
for the opening's poster by Pat Clark (vice-console of the American Embassy
in Paris), proved Max's point that he was aware of the pulse of the art
world from California to Paris.
Max
founded Art Ventures West in 1982 and his dream of a new form of ateliér
was made real. Working with Art graduates from the University of California-San
Diego, Max started working on environmental pieces designed to elevate given
architectural and natural spaces. Research on the content of these works
involved active input from some of the best psychiatric minds in America
(of course they collect Max's work!), including Dr. Fritz Klein, M.D., Dr
Bruce Voeller, PhD, Stephen Gilligan, PhD, and Chris Beletsis, PhD. The
point of all this activity was to distill current psychiatric outlook into
symbolic forms and process the results into an elevation of the environment.
"Bringing our unconscious into the light" is the new axiom Max
laughingly avows, "and it is working!"
His
control of the formal portrait in both aquarelle and oil paint brought many
commissions and in 1983 he completed a portrait of Mayor Roger Hedgecock
which is currently in the collection of Cindy Hedgecock. Over the past years,
his work has been bought for the private collections of many important art
buyers all over the world.
Growth
of Art Ventures West led to a move of the main studio to Europe where Max
currently paints in his studio in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The first European
showing of his work was at De Kleine Akadamie in Amsterdam in April of 1991.
This was the very first showing of a part of his current work Sitko: a major,
complex series dealing with Native American vision, the wolves within us
all, calendar systems and the death of a culture.
Two
shows were held in the fall of 1991 in The Netherlands. The "Sitko" show
(wolves) was shown in October at the Voorheen Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst
in Utrecht while his Mudmen series was shown in November and December at
the Rob Gallery in Amsterdam.
This
biography is in progress, check back later for more complete details and
updates.
