by Ben Lima | 11 September 2010 | Modern
Last March, advised by Jonathan Fineberg and Ethel Kessler, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps reproducing works by the Abstract Expressionists. The honored works are:
There is a press release and a brief blurb. I regret not having noticed this sooner, because the plain old stamps have apparently sold out — only special editions etc. are listed in the online store. (Culture Monster and CultureGrrl were among the only blogs to notice the event; also the Washington Examiner.)
In spite of the excellence of the selections, part of the fun should be rounds of second-guessing. Why a Pollock from 1952 vs. 1947-50? What about Franz Kline, Sam Francis, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes? Does “Abstract Expressionist” mean the same thing in 1983 for Mitchell, as it did around the Cedar Bar — shouldn’t we stop before 1960, and if not, what about Frankenthaler…?
In terms of institutional validation, it must be hard to beat having one’s work appear on a postage stamp. And yet having one’s work shrunken to that scale must also be strange — there is something weird and toylike about a postage-stamp Pollock, more so than even a quarter-page reproduction. After all, “one square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue.” A Postal Service with true cultural ambition (I know, I know) might want to commission artists to create works with postage-stamp scale in mind. I nominate Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, James Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha.
