by Richard Nilsen The Arizona Republic Mar. 14, 2010 12:00 AM
A new set of stamps honors America's "bad boy" artists - and one woman.
The U.S. Postal Service has issued a page of 44-cent stamps with images of 10 paintings by the group of artists known as the New York School, or Abstract Expressionists, who brought the gravitational center of world art from Europe to America for the first time just after World War II. They were famous at the time as gruff, hard-drinking working-man's artists in denims and Dickey's shirts whose work gave up using recognizable subjects for pure color, shape and brushstroke.
Included are Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock - and Joan Mitchell.
Someone once looked at a painting by Pollock - a swirl of drips and swipes - and couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be a landscape, a portrait or a still life."What is it?" he asked the artist.
"A painting," Pollock said.
For him and his colleagues, a painting need not be "of" something anymore than a symphony was "about" something. It was an experience to be had, not to be explained.
This group of artists saw themselves as heroic: They were changing the course of art history and they knew it. And their canvases were heroically large, which kind of makes postage stamps not much more than computer-top icons for the real thing. How can you reduce a wall-size Pollock to an inch square?
One is reminded of a series of paintings by California artist Robert Irwin, who as an experiment once created "tiny epics," by making very small versions of Abstract Expressionist paintings as a kind of ironic joke: Can it be heroic if it's pint-size?
Or, put another way, size matters.
"These bold artists used art to express complicated ideas and primitive emotions in simplified, abstract form," says Linda Kingsley, USPS senior vice president for strategy and transition. "Although these stamps can't compare in size to their real-life canvases, they bring the passion and spirit of Abstract Expressionism to an envelope near you."
Well, maybe. But it is nice to see these artists recognized.
Although you have to wonder, if there are any misprints, will you be able to tell?
