Quaintance: The Short Life of an American Art Pioneer

QUAINTANCE

The Short Life of an American Art Pioneer

An Authoritative Biography of George L. Quaintance

By Ken Furtado and John Waybright

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten

Mademoiselle Bertin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright ©2014 by Ken Furtado

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.

First eBook Edition

ISBN 978-0-9906536-0-8

Dedication

To the dozens of publishers who rejected our manuscript, thus affording ten more years in which to amplify and polish it. And to John, who did not live to see this book published.

Ken Furtado, 2014

To my wonderful wife, Mary Ann, and my friend, Ken.

John Waybright, 2003

The cover was designed and executed by Ken Furtado based on a vintage Cavalier Studio photo showing the artist at his easel. The model is Ron Nyman. The painting is Sacrifice.

Contents

Foreword: The Art of George Quaintance

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1: A Rural South Beginning

2: Art School

3: Dance

4: New Directions

5: The Man Behind the Legend

6: Rancho Siesta

7: Los Amores

8: More Than One … or None?

9: Women & the Quintana Mystery

10: Sculpture

11: Magazines and Other Works

12: Death and Legend

13: The Search for Victor Garcia

Afterword

Appendix I: Commentaries on the Paintings

Appendix II: Notes on Some Preparatory Sketches of George Quaintance

Bibliography

The Authors

Foreword: The Art of George Quaintance

It must have been around the year 1982, when I first came across some work of George Quaintance during a trip to California. I found a few reprints and greeting cards in a gay shop in San Francisco that were printed from his original oil paintings. They had lost much of their aura because of the color shifts of poor printing, but still it made me curious enough to try to find out more about this most extraordinary artist and his work, obviously inspired by the beauty of the male nude.

I have always been fascinated by the connection of art and photography, especially in the innocent style and aesthetics of the 1950s. So George Quaintance’s images became instant icons for me and I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I had established my own gallery a year before in Berlin, Germany. It was the first dedicated solely to gay erotic art worldwide. The idea was born that maybe one day I would be able to have an exhibition of the work of this great artist, and I started immediately to research his work and life.

I traveled to New York, Phoenix and Los Angeles but it wasn’t easy to get any information almost thirty years after the artist’s death, at age 55 in 1957. All I could find were some magazines, photographs and articles from that period. A few years later, I was fortunate enough to meet Bob Mizer, the legendary founder and owner of the Athletic Model Guild in Los Angeles. He was able to provide me with much valuable information. He was not only a close friend of Quaintance but was also the first to publish his work — right on the front cover of his very first issue of Physique Pictorial in 1951.

Mizer was most helpful and patient. He told me many personal stories about his friend George and he opened his immense archive for me, which was a real treasure trove of the information I had been searching for. Later I had the opportunity to purchase some rare original Quaintance paintings and photographs, and as a result the first Quaintance exhibition finally took place in Berlin in 1989. The first book of his work, The Art of George Quaintance, was published, and it became the catalogue for the show.

Such perfection in masculine athletics had never been seen in modern paintings and was only known from classic Greek and Roman art. Quaintance’s work must have been an absolute sensation when it was first published and became popular, in the early 1950s. His art, no doubt, made many homoerotic dreams of romantic cowboy fantasies become reality. The images of his life at home in Arizona were his ideal inspiration. His work motivated numerous less talented and mostly anonymous artists who tried to copy Quaintance’s style and were published in some semi-gay magazines with little success. The only one who ever came close to Quaintance’s male erotic ideal was Tom of Finland, with his early drawings, which also were published as covers and as a series in Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial, post-1957, soon after Quaintance died.

But Tom was not a painter. I wonder what Quaintance would have said about Tom of Finland’s most explicit work in the 1970s and ’80s, which the older artist couldn’t even think of producing during his era. I’m sure he would have enjoyed it as much as anyone else and might have changed his own style to one of more explicit eroticism when American laws and society became more liberal. I’m also sure he would have enjoyed watching the movie Brokeback Mountain, which reflected some of his old gay cowboy dreams on the big screen.

In Quaintance’s most active years, during the Eisenhower era, it was still strictly illegal to be gay and practice homosexuality and to show any kind of frontal nudity of men and women in art and photography. So the artist was forced to hide the genitals of his models and he invented hundreds of techniques to do this without compromising his original intent. It can make us smile sometimes now, fifty years later, but during his time it would have been extremely dangerous and probably the end of his career to ignore those rules. It took another thirteen years after his death until finally in 1970 the laws were changed and the depiction of frontal nudity became legal.

George Quaintance and his art have had a great revival in the last 20 years and he truly deserves to be acknowledged and respected as one of the great American artists of the 20th century. It may well have started in 1989 with his first exhibition and his first book, which is still available and has been reprinted several times. Thanks to authors Ken Furtado and John Waybright, this new book is being published. Being the first complete biography, it includes precious information that was still a big secret and missing when my own book was published. It surely will provide proper recognition of this remarkable man. I offer my own tribute to an immortal artist, one of the greatest ever in celebrating the beauty of the athletic male body.

Volker Janssen

Cape Town, South Africa, 2007

Acknowledgements

In the course of researching and writing this biography, the authors have been assisted by many individuals not only in the United States, but in France, South Africa and other countries of the world. We would especially like to recognize and thank these people and institutions who have provided (or whose written works have provided) invaluable insights and information:

Harland Baker, Laurence V. Baldwin, Richard Barber, David Beahm, Dennis Bell and the Athletic Model Guild, John Belton, Cliff Benjamin, Scotty Bowers, Jeffrey Bulejcik, James L. Burski, Stephanie Cassidy and the Art Student League of New York City, Barry Clark, Jack Cullers, Dr. Bob Delmonteque, Durk Dehner and the Tom of Finland Foundation, Gregory Dunn, Gary Frink, Robert Gordy, Franklin D. Harden, Richard Hawkins, Nancy Hellner, F. Valentine Hooven, Lisa Hull, David Humphrey, Volker Janssen, Laurent Janvier, William S. Kibler, Dewey Lancaster, David Leddick, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Don Libby, Dan Lurie, Colleen MacLachlin, Robert Mainardi, Reed Massengill, John Massey, Gordon Mitchell, Volker Morlock, ONE Institute, Hector Ortiz and Ron Pierce of Apollo Network, Brooks Peters, Rick Quaintance, John S. Raglin, Jonathan Rogers, Gayle Rubin, Judith Finter Salvino, Audrey Richards Sedwick, John Sonsini, Judy Suddith, Claude J. Summers and GLBTQ Encyclopedia, Kevin Thomas, Charles Leonard Verrastro, Rusty Warren, James C. Waybright Jr., Mary Ann Burner Waybright, Joe Weider, Jim Wilkinson, the Reverend Robert W. Wood, YT Orlando and everyone who has shared their stories and images with us via the Internet.

Your feedback, corrections and new information are welcome. Please email kfurtado@georgequaintance.com.

Introduction

From the 1920s to the 1950s, the phenomenon that was George Quaintance blazed a trail across the American cultural landscape that is long overdue for renewed recognition.

In his 55 years, Quaintance had as many careers as a cat has lives. He painted portraits of Washington diplomats, society wives and his friends; he belonged to a successful and widely traveled Vaudeville troupe; he was one of the most highly sought-after women’s hairstylists of the 1930s, with such illustrious clients as Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Jeanette MacDonald, Lynne Fontanne and Helen Hayes; he was a sculptor and muralist; and he was among the vanguard artists of the body-building movement of the 1940s and 1950s, illustrating covers and writing articles for Physique Pictorial, Your Physique, Body Beautiful, Beautify Your Figure and countless other periodicals targeted at both male and female audiences newly conscious of health, personal hygiene and fashion.

Using the pseudonym George Quintana, Quaintance may have created pinup girls for the covers of pulp and movie fan magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, most often Movie Humor, Tempting Tales, and Movie Merry Go-Round. In 1937, Quintana was the highest-paid illustrator for Gay French magazine, earning — according to one Internet source — the astonishing sum of $50,000. As such, he was a forerunner to such later masters of the female pin-up, as Enoch Bolles, Gil Elvgren and Alberto Vargas.

Quaintance was also a professionally trained dancer who performed, on stage, everything from classic ballet to tap and the tango; he wrote and produced plays and talent shows in his native Page County, Virginia; and he capped his career with an astonishing collection of about 55 iconic male physique paintings, as they are commonly called, in which he distilled the essence of masculine beauty into images of nude or partially clad young men of many races, brimming with bonhomie and languid eroticism. Perhaps some of that can be traced to the many years Quaintance spent writing for body-building and physical culture publications, photographing or painting body builders and judging the occasional body building competition.

Quaintance was the first artist to eroticize Levi’s, long before they became an icon of American culture or a badge of gay sexuality. Quaintance also fetishized the cowboy look, affecting it himself in his later years, almost as if in anticipation of the cowboy’s later assimilation into gay culture — an assimilation no doubt abetted by George himself. And before politics knew the difference between correct and incorrect, Quaintance’s paintings embraced Mexican, Native American and Central American peoples and images. While others prated about the love that dared not speak its name, Quaintance quietly revealed its face, and showed it to be simple, masculine, and brave.

But Quaintance was also a canny publicist for his own work, carefully cultivating the images he wished to project. Cursed with thin, limp hair, he wore lavish wigs. He lied about his age. He represented his Mexican boyfriend, Edwardo, as an Apache because, as one paramour observed, it was more glamorous. And the fabled Arizona studio, dubbed Rancho Siesta in the pages of the physical culture magazine Physique Pictorial, was represented as an estate in the town of Paradise Valley, populated with models, staffers, ex-lovers and a coterie of followers who were always young, handsome, built like gods and clad in little more than 501s and boots. It was sheer marketing panache. In reality, Quaintance’s Arizona studio/residence was a modest 1950s ranch home in what is now the Loma Linda neighborhood in east central Phoenix, on a double lot about 200 feet by 100 feet.

Quaintance’s name was once a gay household word. It has even been suggested that GQ magazine, which was launched the year of Quaintance’s death, capitalized on his fame — and on his initials. Wikipedia asserts that the art direction of Querelle, a 1982 film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was inspired by the paintings of George Quaintance. And Quaintance’s pioneering use of projection techniques in the fine arts is now seeing a renascence.

George Quaintance was a bridge between two generations of gay sensibility, an embodiment of what writer Douglass Shand-Tucci, in his book The Crimson Letter, calls The Warrior Archetype. The Warrior Archetype, of which American poet Walt Whitman is the prototype, conflates masculinity and eros into an esthetic of manliness that may include gay sex but that does not reduce to gay sex. Historical parallels would be the Japanese Samurai tradition and the ancient Greek concept of warrior-lovers, the latter of which is strongly implied in several Quaintance paintings. The scenarios of Quaintance’s paintings are an anachronism; they harken back to a time now lost in our culture, when men could be together unself-consciously, expressing affection and comfort with their association.

Literary critic Roger Austen writes, in Playing the Game, In the nineteenth century males could kiss each other but not disrobe; in the twentieth century they could undress together but not kiss.

Quaintance captures a fleeting moment between these poles, where the models could both kiss and disrobe. His male physique paintings are the apotheosis of this 20th century sea-change, in which casual nudity among men becomes so expressive and so connotative — with never a penis to be seen — as to assume a potency previously associated only with pornography.

That would all change radically, and soon. Within a year of Quaintance’s death, a new artistic force emerged on the erotic landscape, by the name of Tom of Finland. Tom — who cited Quaintance as one of the artists who influenced his drawing — drew images so exaggerated and so sexually explicit they made Quaintance seem, well, quaint by comparison.

Before Quaintance, erotic masculine images were hardly to be found except in the arts of ancient Greece and Rome, underground images from Europe, and the works of a few bold painters and photographers such as Wilhelm von Gloeden, F. Holland Day, Paul Cadmus and Thomas Eakins. Soon afterwards, there was hardcore porn, and the VCR. Today there is the Internet, in all its hardcore glory.

In this narrow window of time and opportunity, Quaintance found a niche that earned him fame, wealth and recognition, even if within only a small sphere of influence. His paintings today are scarce and highly desired; they pass from collector to eager collector, hardly ever being offered on the market. His sculptures are even harder to find. And the photographs that he mass-produced and sold for $1.00 each through his mail-order business now fetch astonishingly high prices on eBay.

Whether or not George Quaintance is a name you are familiar with, we invite you to turn the page and, for the first time in print, meet the man behind the image.

1: A Rural South Beginning

Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains stand misted in pastel shades. From a vantage point in the isolated valley below, the age-eroded peaks seem distant, but they are only a few miles away. Farms, some well-kept, others cluttered and seedy, dominate the area along the Shenandoah River and its Hawksbill Creek tributary. It appears today much as it did at the start of the twentieth century, when almost all of the river bottom lands and the less hilly limestone fields had been cleared and turned to practical human use. In 1902, the descendants of those early pioneers lived in relatively comfortable homes surrounded by acres of pasture land and crop-planted fields.

The Page Valley lies in the eastern part of the historic Shenandoah Valley, nestled between the Massanutten Mountain and the higher peaks of the Blue Ridge. The south fork of the Shenandoah River, immortalized in folk song and stories, meanders through the county, one of the rare rivers flowing toward the northeast.

Page was the home county of Ella Belle Quaintance and it was here she returned for the birth of her second child, her first and only son. He would be the last child born to Ella Belle and George Henry. Ella Belle arrived at the Stanley, Virginia train station from Philadelphia on May 3, 1902. The local newspaper reported that she and her six-year-old daughter, Nannie Maude (named after Ella Bell’s sister Nannie), were visiting, but the brief mention gave no indication of why they traveled here. In the last month of her pregnancy, the 31-year-old Ella Belle had come to her home county without her husband, George Henry Quaintance. The couple had lived in Philadelphia since shortly after their marriage in Virginia, in 1894. Like many other young pregnant women in those days, Mrs. Quaintance followed tradition in returning home for the birth of her child. However, instead of staying with her parents, she found accommodations in the larger Victorian-style home of her sister, Nannie Finter. Nannie was married to Dr. Hubert P. Finter, a prominent local physician who obviously was chosen to attend the Quaintance birth. In the Finters’ sprawling house, George L. Quaintance1.1 breathed his first gulp of country air … after a sharp slap on his tiny rump from his good old Uncle Hubert. The date was June 3, 1902.

Nationally, this was a time of economic hardship following the big railroad boom of the 1880s and 1890s, but the hardy residents of the rural Alma community in Page County took little notice of the monetary setbacks. The farmers, merchants, craftsmen, blacksmiths, lawyers and doctors were long accustomed to isolation and ill-compensated labors. While city economists fretted, these rural folks went quietly about their lives.

Even in this isolated and somewhat depressed atmosphere, George Quaintance lived a rare and charmed life almost from the day of his birth. He was a bright and good-looking child, and the center of attention for his parents, a large extended family and a close coterie of friends.

Sisters Ella Belle and Nannie were Page County