Modern art celebrated by new postage stamp collection
The U.S. Postal Service is on a roll. The agency has continued its recent run of announcing planned 2013 stamps by revealing the latest installation for next year will be a stamp set celebrating modern art in America. More stamps mean more envelopes will be sent, making address verification software an immense advantage for direct mail senders.
The USPS will commemorate 12 artists and their defining modern art masterpieces, as well as the 100th anniversary of The Armory Show, a groundbreaking modern art exhibit that debuted in New York City in 1913.
The seminal pieces of modern art reproduced as Forever stamps were all created between 1912 and 1931. Among the notable inclusions in the stamp set is Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which was the most talked-about work at the 1913 Armory Show. While not an actual depiction of a person walking down steps, the cubist and modernist classic has reviled and elated critics for decades.
Another highly regarded piece reproduced in the collection is by Charles Sheeler, a pioneer in the modern American art community whose American Landscape fused rural traditions and urban, industrial and future elements into his portrait of the country.