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- Written by: Ken Furtado
After ten years and dozens of publishers' rejections, the George Quaintance biography that John and I coauthored is available as an ebook. John passed away in 2013, and in 2014, I made a New Year's resolution to create an ebook version by year's end. I completely re-wrote every chapter, adding about 12,000 words to the original
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- Written by: Ken Furtado
These two items are from George Quaintance's scrapbooks. The image on the left appears to be a page from Coronet magazine, which began publishing in 1936. The image on the right appears to be a newspaper clipping. There is no explanatory information for either image, although Robert of Fifth Avenue was a department store that employed Quaintance in the 1930s.
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- Written by: Ken Furtado
What becomes of an artist's legacy when there is no exhibition history, no clear estate, and no body of written work or other documentation to authenticate it? In the case of George Quaintance, it disturbs me to see so many paintings and drawings that are represented as his.
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- Written by: Ken Furtado
The lost works I reported about on Dec. 14, 2013 were only the tip of the iceberg of lost art by Quaintance: those canvases Quaintance considered to be part of his "Male Physique" period. Essentially, they were the paintings he mass-reproduced as chromes and as 8x10 black and white photographs and marketed in magazines. But Quaintance painted a lot more than those 54 canvases — such as the Bugle Boy depicted in the first part of this article.
What became of the original art for the 11 covers he designed for Your Physique magazine, when he was the Art Editor? Each of those issues states on the contents page that the cover is "From a painting by George Quaintance." When I interviewed Joe Weider, the magazine's publisher, at his Woodland Hills, Calif. office in 2003, I asked him about those covers. His high-ceilinged fortress was crammed with art, much of it in the form of portraits and paintings of strong men who had appeared in his magazines over the years. But nothing by Quaintance. After thinking for a while, Joe muttered something about robberies that had taken place long ago, or the possibility that the paintings were archived in warehouses in Montreal, Canada, where his publishing empire was born. He offered to check with his brother, but that inquiry turned up nothing.