Memphis Stamp Club

Titian
Venus Anadyomene

The Postal Authorities of the World 
Throughout Philatelic History Have Used Famous Artists' 
masterieces and Nudes on Postage Stamps

My collection represents breath-taking, philatelic art 
depicting and reproducing some of the world's best known masterpieces.

Trucial States were blacklisted in the philatelic "Black Blot" lists of the 1970's. They're becoming scarcer, more valuable, more collectible. It's been said that some were removed from sale, forbidden for use and destroyed by their respective postal authorities.

From Apfelbaum Inc.
Very few collectors today remember the APS Black Blot program. Begun in the 1960’s and finally ending in the early 1990’s, the Black Blot was a Seal of Disapproval given to new issues from various countries, which the APS deemed exploitive of collectors. The goal was high-minded, and the criteria for the Black Blot were clear. Issues, that had no postal necessity, had excessive numbers of individual stamps and high values relative to the postal needs of the issuing country, as well as issues that included intentional errors or imperfs were given the Black Blot. The goal was to warn collectors away from collecting these postage stamps and for a time the Scott catalog refused to list stamps that had received the APS Black Blot (and indeed, to this day, many of the earlier Black Blot issues are still unlisted in Scott). The APS had a committee of volunteers, who evaluated the tens of thousands of the world’s annual production of stamps and applied these criteria to determine which stamps got Black Blotted. The list of blotted stamps was published monthly in the American Philatelist, the journal of the American Philatelic Society. By the late 1980’s the monthly list was long indeed.

Initially, when it was first proposed, the Black Blot had widespread collector support especially among the party elites. The elites were reacting to a serious change in the stamp issuing policies of many worldwide postal agencies. Until 1890, it was very unusual for a country to issue a stamp that had no postal purpose. However between 1890 and 1930 philatelic agencies became very exploitive, with issues such as the 1893 Columbian issues, the 1898 Canadian Jubilee issue and the hundreds of stamps issues by the French and Portuguese Colonies during the period of 1890-1930. These are all considered classics now, but were viewed with disdain by most of the serious collectors at the time. The 1930-1960 period, with the Great Depression, WW II, and the reconstruction after the war had calmed most nation’s philatelic new issue fervor (aided by the fact that most collectors worldwide had neither the time nor the money for many new issues during this period). But by 1960 many new countries existed in independent Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia and new exploitive postal issues began to appear again.

Collector reaction to the APS Black Blot was mixed. Many saw the Black Blot as an attempt by the philatelic elites to dictate what people should collect. Many felt that a stamp was a stamp, and it was up to each collector to decide what to put in his collection. This is true, but at the same time most collectors lacked the information to determine whether a new issue is valid or just a rip off. At its core, the Black Blot was a legitimate attempt to influence collector demand and help to curb exploitive issues. But the Black Blot was swimming against the tide. In the boom times of the 1960’s and 1970’s there was too much collector money around and postal agencies worldwide fought to scoop that money into their coffers. It was fine to most American collectors for the Black Blot committee to sanction the 1970’s issues of Sharjah. But by the 1990s, many of the issues of previously legitimate postal agencies met (and exceeded) the Black Blot criteria of excessive new issues. The Black Blot was pretty much closed down when it appeared that, it would have to start sanctioning the stamps of the United States as being exploitive of philatelists under traditional guidelines.

The incredible proliferation of new issues that has inundated our hobby is hard for newer stamp collectors to fathom. The year I was born, 1953, the United States issued 12 commemoratives stamps and no definitives, airmails or postal cards. The total postage value of the stamp issued that year was 36c. In 2014, our postal service issued 106 stamps at a postage value of over $85, this in an era of vastly decreased first class mail stamp usage. It’s a good thing that the American Philatelic Society did away with the Black Blot 25 years ago. Using their criteria nearly all US postal issues would be Black Blotted today.
https://www.apfelbauminc.com/american-philatelic-society-black-blot/Click any image to enlarge and view.To save, right-click the opened image and choose to save to your hard drive.Open the saved image from your folder location and enlarge for close-up viewing.

Although valid for postal use, and extraordinarily beautiful, 
in some nations it would have been highly inadvisable to send a 
Christmas, Chanukah, Birthday, Get Well, Mother's Day card, 
or pay a bill with any pf these stamps attached to the envelope.

And this is perhaps the reason  why today their scarcer than ever.

Rubens, Jordaens, Mabuse, Torres, Goya

Titian, Michalangelo,Renoir, Rubens, Bottecelli

Jordaens, Ingres, Rubens, Van Haarlem, Boucher, Medina, Dix, Renoir, Cosimo, Velazquez

Salviati, Michelangelo, Rubens, Corregio, Giordano, Reni, Titian

Bronzino, Cagnacci, Boucher, Chasseriau, Derain, Modigliani, Monet, La Fuente, Renoir

Rubens, Renoir

Ingres, de La Hyre, Veronese, Titian, Rembrandt, Savoldo, Brackman, Boucher, Rubens, Da Vinci, Tintoretto, Correggio 

Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Padua, Van Der Goes, Durero, Liss, Terraza, Beniort, Renoir, Gauguin, Steinlen, de Cristo, Pompeii, Ceylon

Iser, Renoir, Delacroix, Grigorescu, Ressu, Pallady

Rubens

Cranach, Ingres, Velazquez, Boucher

Goya, Titian, Ingres, di Cosimo, Rubens

Durer, Gerson, Rubens, Potiers, Bordon, Bouguereau, Bonnevalle, Bratislave

David, Renoir, Chavannes, Botticelli, Picasso, Ingres, Manet, Rembrandt

Furini, Lotz, Karoly, Naldini, Utamaro,  Ricci, Strnad

Titziano
Danae Receiving the shower

Titian
Venus

Degas
After The Bath

Degas
The Morning Bath

Picasso 
Harlequin's Family

Degas
The Morning Bath

Picasso
Woman Dressing Her Hair

Goya 
Naked Maja

Ajman 

Ajman

van der goes
Adam and eve 
the devil & the tree of life

Image caption

Nudes On Stamps 
Video

Goya's Naked Maja

Date of issue May 9, 1929–June 21, 1930

The issue was dedicated to the closure of the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville (May 9, 1929 – June 21, 1930) and at the same time to the 100th anniversary of the death of Francisco de Goya.

Stamps with naked Maja were privately ordered from the London printer Waterlow & Sons, but the Spanish governmental mail service (Correos) recognized this issue as legitimate in exchange for a part of the circulation.

Appearance in 1930 of the Maja Desnuda series caused a scandal in conservative Catholic Spain. The purists made loud public protests denouncing the threat to public morality. According to them, in particular, such stamps would corrupt innocent children who collected stamps. At the same time, stamp dealers were displaying the shocking series in their shop windows.

Meanwhile, the stamp scandal went beyond Spain itself. The Universal Postal Union started receiving protests (and some of them at the national level, which could result in a post war), but these protests, however, were not satisfied. Time, one of the leading US magazines of the time, wrote about a wave of indignation worldwide risen due to the issuance of these stamps. The edition explained:"An indecent picture is bad enough, but a postage stamp, whose back side must be licked! …Millions of innocent children collect stamps."

In 1952, Ostend police (Belgium) confiscated La maja desnuda stamps from the shop window of a local stamp dealer as "immoral.". Renown US humorist and columnist for The New Yorker Frank Sullivan loved to glue them on letters to his friends. Initially, postal authorities in various cities of the United States treated the shocking stamps differently: thus, in Boston in July 1930 they were mutilated in passing through the mails, while at the same time in Washington, DC, according to the press, “they had nothing to do with the stamp designs of other countries.” By the end of 1930, however, the U.S. Mail has officially banned all mail franked with the Majas from entering the country. Such mail was barred and apparently returned to senders. However, according to philatelic experts, not a single returned mail is known.
US authorities made their claims specific in 1958–1959, when a film by Henry Koster The Naked Maja came out co-produced by the USA, Italy and France. For advertising purposes, United Artists Corp. tried then to mail out 2,268 postcards announcing the film and carrying a reproduction of the Goya's painting La Maja Desnuda, but the distribution was halted by the Post Office Department, which held that it violated Sections 1461 and 1463 of Title 18 of the United States Code, forbidding the mailing of "lewd, lascivious or indecent" matter.
The film company's protest stating that the postcards reproduced a painting being publicly displayed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, was, however, rejected. At hearings, the court found that the presence of the La Maja Desnuda painting in the museum was not a crime, but distribution of such images is "sexy-pandering to a lewd and lascivious interest on the part of the average man." 

NOTE: This legal rule is no longer in force in the United States (since 1996).
In 2000, the scandalous series of 1930 Spanish stamps was immortalized in a novel, Hit List by Lawrence Block, where the central character Keller described in detail his teenager collector's feelings in relation to its purchase. In philatelic literature La maja desnuda of 1930 is considered to be "...the best-known sexually related stamp in history, probably." 
from Wikipedia