by Vandana Jain

3: Canvas
Designs in connection with postage stamps ... may be described,
I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste. -W. B. Yeats

Burt Kerr Todd, the scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh family, had been many things in his life: a guano importer, a big game hunter, a Fijian rum manufacturer, and a marketer of Singaporean seaweed. But it was in his role as adviser to the Bhutanese Royal Family (he had gone to university with the Queen of Bhutan) that he would gain his everlasting fame.

During the 1950s, Bhutan's poverty and obscurity meant it was under constant threat of being annexed by its gargantuan neighbors - India and China. When Todd was asked to suggest ways of raising the country's revenue and profile, his uncommon mind proposed the creation of a range of postage stamps. So it was that in 1962, under Todd's guidance, Bhutan's first collectible stamp was issued. It was printed on silk.

Before long, Bhutan had issued plastic stamps, scratch-and-sniff stamps, 3-D stamps, and even steel stamps, although these had an alarming tendency to rust. Sometimes Todd overreached himself, as when he assigned Bhutan an air mail stamp before it even had an airport, but the stamps swiftly became one of the country's main revenue-producers as collectors rushed to buy them. Most coveted of all were the country's "talking stamps," tiny vinyl records that could be affixed to an envelope and played on a record player, offering the listener snippets of Bhutanese folk song, the national anthem, and a concise history of Bhutan narrated by Todd himself.

Traditionally stamp design had aped paintings, coins, architecture, and heraldry. Todd began the process of abstracting them. A stamp could be anything, he insisted, as long as it stuck to an envelope and caught the collector's eye. At the time of his death, in 2006, he was busy working on Bhutan's first CD-Rom postage stamp.

by Sandra Eula Lee

The considerable revenue to be gained from selling stamps to collectors has forced innovation upon official stamp designs. Over the last half-century Tonga has created stamps in the shape of bananas, Sierra Leone invented the first self-adhesive stamp in the shape of the country itself, and Switzerland fashioned stamps out of both lace and wood. Yet no matter how outré such stamps may appear, they cannot shake themselves free from their civic roots. To appear on a postage stamp still remains the sine qua non of respectability-stamps have always been heralds of a social hierarchy and of prescribed taste. It is thus no wonder that some artists have taken to gleefully attacking the stamp's familiar form and subverting it; anything to shake our unquestioning faith in its authority.

The first art stamps, or artistamps, are thought to have been the creation of the German Expressionist painter, Karl Schwesig. Imprisoned in an internment camp in Vichy France, Schwesig came upon the blank perforated margins of an actual stamp sheet. On this he created twenty-seven stamps, in various denominations, brazenly depicting barbed wire, beatings, and the terrible conditions in the camp. The motto of the French Republic, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, appeared damningly along the stamps' base.

By 1959, Yves Klein was painting over regular postage stamps with his trademark color, International Klein Blue. Devoid of any signifying information, Klein's stamps were a refutation of the official data that usually subsumes postage stamps. Klein even bribed postal clerks to cancel them, thus affording his stamps a governmental seal of approval.

by Melissa Brown

Yet the most concerted attack on the postage stamp came in the 1960s when Robert Watts, a member of the art collective Fluxus, designed perforated blocks of stamps with realistic denomination, filigree, and identifying legends (even if these did read "Yamflug" and "Fluxpost"). But Watts chose his stamps' images not from the approved governmental pantheon of worthies but from old postcards, advertisements, and girlie magazines. The old hierarchy had been replaced.

At the other end of the artistamp spectrum was the painter Donald Evans. Rather than kicking against the postage stamp, he embraced it, both in form and connotation. Maybe it was because Evans had collected real stamps as a child that he eschewed iconoclasm. He recalled how, when he was young, he could make faraway places or current events "more real" by drawing stamps of them. Continuing this practice in adulthood, Evans began to depict his own life in delicately water-colored stamp issues. His stamps portrayed an imaginary world filtered through his own biography.

The subjects were largely traditional-royalty, climate, customs-but the countries from which they heralded were highly symbolic. The countries of Amis and Amants issued stamps which reflected Evans's friendships and loves; his curiosity in mysticism saw the creation of the country of Gnostis, whose issues were populated with cabbalistic symbols. Mangiare issued stamps of Evans's favorite Italian food. Barcentrum celebrated the drinks in his favorite bar. By the time Evans died in 1977 at the age of thirty-one, he had painted and catalogued over 4,000 stamps from forty-two imaginary countries, each one's sheer depth of detail dragging the viewer deeper into the geography of his mind.

by Line Up