Legendary Artist Emilio Sanchez Honored Forever Postage Stamps

Emilio Sanchez was born in Cuba in 1921 and spent most of his working life in New York, painting buildings - facades, shutters, doorways, the shadow a roofline throws at midday - stripped back until the architecture becomes geometry and light. His work is held in museum and university collections around the world. This issue marked the centenary of his birth and made him the first Cuban American artist honoured on a United States postage stamp.

It is a stamp for a particular kind of correspondence: galleries and museums, architecture and design practices, Latin American studies departments, arts organizations writing to donors. Anyone who has an interest in mid-century painting will recognize it, and everyone else gets a clean piece of color on the envelope. Sheets of 20, and the flat blocks of color survive being shrunk to stamp size better than most painting reproductions do.