Volume 28, Number 8 · May 14, 1981
The Album of Donald Evans
By Bruce Chatwin
The World of Donald Evans
text by Willy Eisenhart
Harlin Quist Books, 173 pp., $16.95
On the night of the twenty-ninth of April, 1977, a fire, sweeping through a house on the Stadhouderskade in Amsterdam, caught the American artist Donald Evans on the staircase and burned him to death. He left behind him, scattered among collections on both sides of the Atlantic, several thousand miniature watercolors in the form of postage stamps. These stamps were 'issued' in sets by forty-two countries, each corresponding to a phase, a friendship, a mood, or a preoccupation in the artist's life. In style, they more or less resemble 'colonial' stamps of the late nineteenth century. The sets were then mounted on the black album pages of professional philatelists, a background that showed up the singularity of each stamp as a work of art in its own right while, at the same time, allowing the artist to play games of pattern and color on a grid.
Review, 1844 words
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