Artists send Christmas cards, too. Maybe some readers of Real Clear Arts have been lucky enough to receive them.
For the rest of us, there’s an exhibition of examples, drawn from the Archives of American Art*; it’s been on view since Nov. 20 at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture — aka the home of the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum — and continues through Jan. 10, 2010.
Called Season’s Greetings: Holiday Cards From the Archives of American Art, it includes examples by Philip Guston, Alexander Calder, Dan Flavin, Kay Sage, Ernest Blumenschein, Arnold Newman and others.
The Archives, smartly, lets online visitors send one of the nine cards (click on title link, above), three of which I’ve pasted here. From top to bottom, they are by Demi and Arturo Rodriguez made sometime in the 1980s-90s; by Edward F. Dickerson, 
sent in 1959 (to printmaker Prentiss Taylor); and by Noche Crist, c. 1962 (also to Prentiss Taylor).
The show is located in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Archives of American Art at the Reynolds Center.
Simultaneously, and also until Jan. 10, the Archives has mounted an exhibit called Winter Wonderland at its New York City research center. It shows holiday cards made by artists and received by painters Kathleen Blackshear (1897-1988) and Ethel Spears (1902-1974). For images in that show, go here.
Photos: Courtesy Archives of American Art
*I consult to a foundation that supports the Archives