The U.S. Postal Service is releasing a new collection of stamps that honor artist Ellsworth Kelly. Known as one of America’s greatest 20th-century abstractionists, Kelly died at age 92 in 2015.
Kelly’s artistic background includes working as a designer of camouflage patterns while in serving in the Army. He especially known for his vibrant, hard-edged color fields. Describing his work, Kelly once stated, “I’m not a geometric artist,” he once insisted, despite his frequent use of crisp geometric shapes. “Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art. My forms are geometric, but they don’t interact in a geometric sense. They’re just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don’t see them.”
The stamps feature tiny reproductions of ten of Kelly’s candy-colored paintings: Yellow White (1961), Colors for a Large Wall (1951), Blue Red Rocker (1963), Spectrum I (1953), South Ferry (1956), Blue Green (1962), Orange Red Relief (for Delphine Seyrig) (1990), Meschers (1951), Red Blue (1964), and Gaza (1956).
