Mail Art of Donald Evans

Invented Countries, Invented Flags, Invented Money

The World of Donald Evans (cover), 1994 edition.

Donald Evans (1945–1977) was a mail artist. He made artist stamps.¹

An artist's stamp is anything that has philatelic characteristics (perforation, face value, gluability, attachment to a postal envelope, etc.). ²

Philatelists classify so-called para-stamps used for non-postal purposes as well as artists' stamps in addition to documentary, propaganda and charity stamps, as well as seals of this form.

Donald Evans Painted Postage Stamps of Nonexistent Countries

Artist Donald Evans spent his life painting the postage stamps of nonexistent countries. “The stamps are a kind of diary or journal,” he said. “It’s vicarious traveling for me to a made-up world that I like better than the one that I’m in.”

“On little paper rectangles he painted precise transcriptions of his life,” wrote Willy Eisenhart in The World of Donald Evans (1980). “He commemorated everything that was special to him, disguised in a code of stamps from his own imaginary countries — each detailed with its own history, geography, climate, currency and customs — all of it representative of the real world but, like real stamps, apart from it in calm tranquility.”

Evans painted them as watercolors the size of actual stamps, handling the paper with tweezers and working always with the same trusty brush. When they were finished he would sometimes cancel them with a fanciful postmark carved from a rubber eraser. He preserved them in a 330-page book modeled on a real stamp catalogue, recording in each case the name of the fictional country, the fictional date, the subject and occasion of the stamp’s issue, and the date on which he had completed the painting. He called this book his Catalogue of the World.³

Evans gave an interview at the Paris Review in which he discussed the nations he had invented.⁴

On April 29, 1977, Evans's Amsterdam apartment building caught fire. He did not escape.

International Artistamp project exhibited Donald Evans

Artistamps were a means during the Cold War for artists to experience the mentality that gave them the illusion of solidarity and equality between artists from East and West.

György Galántai developed an international “artistamp” collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. He generated an extensive postal activity under the auspices of the Artpool brand and this served as the starting point for his international artistamp project titled World Art Post, a collection of the hundreds of artistamps, which he exhibited in 1982 at an exhibition organized at the Fészek Gallery.⁵

During the Communist Era of Hungary, Galántai organized illegal, underground avant-garde exhibitions and therefore he was considered to be a "dangerous element" by the Party for spreading western propaganda, and was monitored by secret police, who opened the file "Painter" solely documenting his activity. From the late seventies he started an intense correspondence with fellow artists all over the world, joining into the network of mail art despite the Iron Curtain limiting his access for information. In 1979 he created an archive for these correspondences and other documents which he collected on Hungarian neo-avantgarde movements and initiated Art Pool which became the largest archive of new mediums such mail art, and artistamp etc. in Central Europe.

Donald Evans Art Stamps were displayed at ArtPool.

Artpool - The archives of Avant-garde art

1. I started this post then realized I wanted to see Donald Evans’ catalog before I wrote about him. I obtained Willy Eisenhart’s 1980 book, The World of Donald Evans 1. Pr ed. New York: Harlin Quist. Several later editions have been published. “He mounted and identified all the stamps in notebooks — the three-volume World Wide Stamp Album,’ alphabetically arranged by country. Separately he typed and illustrated leaflets modeled on real collectors’ catalogues. For instance, in his ‘A Catalog of the Stamps of Aluala, 1939-1957,’ he listed all the issues with their dates, denominations and colors, as well as prices in Alualan pounds for mint condition and canceled stamps.”

2. Artistamp - (Wikipedia). There is an organization of Mail Artists: IUOMA -International Union of Mail Artists

3. Art Archives - Page 42 of 68 - Futility Closet

4. Evans, Donald. 1975. “A Portfolio of Stamps of the World.” Paris Review, no. 62 (Summer): 75–87. (talks about the countries). See also A Natural Curiosity: The World of Donald Evans

5. ParaStamp: Four Decades of Artistamps from Fluxus to the Internet, curator: György Galántai, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, March 23–June 24, 2007. Kürti, Emese, Zsuzsa László, and Emese Kürti.

What Will Be Already Exists : Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central Europe and Beyond. Edited by Zsuzsa László and Emese Kürti. 1st ed. Bern: transcript Verlag, 2021.