The US Postal Service must have heard our collective wail at the news that they’re looking to scale back mail delivery to five days a week, cutting out Saturday entirely. Because they’ve just offered us a real treat in the form of new stamps emblazoned with canvases from the Abstract Expressionism period of the 1940-50s. As Twitter user @rcwellington reports, the stamps are “HUGE!” Set in a stylized frame riffing on elements from Barnett Newman’s Achilles (1952), the stamp party pack includes ten AbEx favorites. Get a closer look after the jump.
The Postal Service tells us that the ten canvases were chosen by Art Director Ethel Kessler and “noted” art historian Jonathan Fineberg (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign). So what did they go with to embody what is arguably American art’s most famous historical period?
The Golden Wall by Hans Hofmann (1961)
1948–C by Clyfford Still (1948); Achilles by Barnett Newman (1952)
The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb by Arshile Gorky (1944)
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 by Robert Motherwell (1953-54)
La Grande Vallée series by Joan Mitchell — pictured, #83, featured on stamp, #0 (1983); Romanesque Façade by Adolph Gottlieb (1949)
Asheville by Willem de Kooning (1948)
Orange and Yellow by Mark Rothko (1956)
Convergence by Jackson Pollock (1952)
Order yours here — $4.40 per sheet.