Max Coyer was born in Hartford, CT in 1954 and attended Trinity College in Hartford, opting to major in poetry. After a few semesters he found that poetry was not his calling, and that the visual arts would allow him to truly express himself. He moved to New York and found himself well-suited to its half bohemian half modernistic feel.

Max Coyer was best known for his paintings, which he referred to as "synthetic art," his theory and name for the current art movement, in which he proclaimed the split between academic and modernist art to be at an end; that new art was "synthetic" - influenced heavily by both movements and with neither of their methods (figurative and abstract, respectively), but an amalgamation of both.

Coyer's work has been exhibited all over the country, most notably at the Harm Bouckaert Gallery in New York, the Dalsheimer Gallery of Baltimore, and the Louis Newman Galleries of Beverly Hills. The remainder of his work now resides with his family in Connecticut, most notably his nieces who are beginning to show and offer his work for sale again.