Artistamp - History

History

The first artist to produce an "artist’s stamp" is open to interpretation. Fine artists were certainly commissioned to create poster stamps (advertising posters in collectible stamp form) from the late 1800s, but none appear to have worked with the format outside the commercial or advertising context.

In 1919, Dadaist Raoul Hausmann affixed a self-portrait postage stamp to a postcard, but given that Dada was determinedly anti-art (at least in theory), calling this an "artist’s stamp" seems almost counterintuitive.

German artist Karl Schwesig, while a political prisoner during World War II, drew a series of pseudo-stamps on the blank, perforated margins of postage stamp sheets, using coloured inks. Jas Felter asserts that this 1941 series, which illustrated life in a concentration camp, is typically accepted as the first true set of artist's stamps.

Robert Watts, a member of the Fluxus group, became the first artist to create a full sheet of postage stamps within a fine art context when he produced a perforated block of 15 stamps combining popular and erotic imagery in 1961.

Canadian multimedia artist and philatelist T Michael Bidner, who made his life's work the cataloguing of all then-known artist's stamps, coined the word "artistamp" in 1982. It quickly became the term of choice amongst mail artists.

Artist Clifford Harper published a series of designs for anarchist postage stamps in 1988, featuring portraits of Shelley, Emma Goldman, Oscar Wilde, Emiliano Zapata and Herbert Read.