- Written by: Ken Furtado
On Aug. 18, the Swann Auction Gallery of NYC held its annual auction of LGBTQ+ art, material culture and history. Of the 443 lots offered, four were Quaintance material.
Anyone who thinks the USA is on the cusp of a recession should be encouraged by the robust bidding, which exceeded five-figure bids for about 18 of the items offered. If you add the 30% buyers fee for each lot, state sales tax based on the domicile of the high bidder, plus packing and shipping, successful bidders forked over a boatload of dollars that day.
The first Quaintance item was an 8x10 duotone photograph of the artist, sporting a blond wig, standing beside his easel, on which rests the painting Havasu Creek. The photo is signed and inscribed. Quaintance was fond of this photo and he kept copies on hand to give to friends and buyers. I owned two such photos myself, both of which I sold on eBay in 2013. One, similarly signed and inscribed, sold for $131.50. The other, which was not, sold for $10. The latter photo is shown here. Hammer price of the photo at the Swann auction was $700.
The next Quaintance lot featured the all-blue Moonflower canvas that was the subject of my July 28 blog entry. The auction house called this painting Moonglow, and it failed to attract the minimum opening bid of $4400. The gallery subsequently notified me that the painting sold the following day for $4500.
A signed copy of the Siesta lithograph was the next GQ item. Although the opening bid was set at $1100, the auctioneer opened the bidding in the $400 range and the winning bid was $900.
The final Quaintance lot was the Narcissus sculpture. Although these sculptures were produced and sold in simple terra cotta, a previous owner of this particular one coated it in white lacquer. The hideous result did not prevent a buyer from spending $2000 to acquire it.
Quaintance employed three ways to sign his sculptures: his name scratched into the wet hydrostone (clay) with a stylus; a stamped imprint; or an actual signature in ink. This Narcissus is signed in ink. The Quaintance Studio continued to do business after George's death, and it's plausible that the imprinted signature and the stylus-inscribed signature were made by one of George's business partners when he was no longer there to add his actual signature.
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- Written by: Ken Furtado
Upon beginning research for the Quaintance bio, I created a database to record the date, dimensions, models and current location/ownership of every painting of the male physique period that I could document.
Fast-forward 19 years and many remain unaccounted for. I expected that a letter discovered in 2003, in a scrapbook at the Tom of Finland Foundation, would lead me to two canvases. The writer spoke of finding "a pair in their original frames" at an antique store. He thought they had "a wonderful fifties naïve quality to them," although he did not know when he bought them who George Quaintance was. The letter was written in 1995. It gave no clue as to which paintings he found.
Despite eight years having passed, I wrote to the fellow — snail mail — and never got a reply. Until 14 years later. Snail mail, indeed! He wrote:
I didn't actually know who George was when I bought the paintings and research had to be done the old-fashioned way. Two sources that helped was the Society of Illustrators and Roger Reed at the Illustration Gallery as far as having a minimal amount of biographical information. Though I didn't know George, I did recognize his style from something in the past, I think it was from the fitness magazines. The shop owner was an older gay gentleman and he had them in a closet. He pulled them out. The shop owner had a huge crush on me and so he was kind enough to allow me to pay for the paintings over time.
The paintings turned out to be Coral Reef and Sunlit Depths.
He went on to say, "The paintings are big. These are approximately 3x4, still in their original frames. I've owned them now for over twenty years (ed. note: this was in 2017). I should make some digital photos, as I'm sure I mentioned in the actual paintings there are no accidental waves covering their anatomy, as pictured frequently in books. The men are full nudes sans water foam. One swimmer is cut, the other not."
The frontal nudity is remarkable. Due to obscenity laws at the time, Quaintance took great care to conceal the genitals of every male he painted. Only in his sculptures — Ocean Wave, Narcissus, and two of Neptune's Children — did he ever show a penis.
Earlier this year, I persuaded the owner to send me photos of the pair. The image quality is mediocre, one hand is cut off and there's no visible signature on either canvas. Yet there they are. Mirabile visu! According to the Quaintance Studio, the models were Jim Glasper (buns), Edwardo and Bill Bredlau.
It appears that the canvases are not dated. Their present owner concurs, "The sig is on the front. No date as I recall. They are actually crated."
The Rev. Bob Wood, a former lover and long-time correspondent of Quaintance (and about whom I have written elsewhere), dated them at 1956. Wood also said the duo was a private commission that later disappeared. Perhaps the fact that the canvases were destined to go directly from easel to buyer allowed George to make an exception about showing the genitals.
One hopes that time will reveal more of this story; the owner is incommunicado once more. A copy of the black-and-white photo versions of the paintings that were sold by the Quaintance Studio is included for comparison. Coral Reef is the photo on the right.
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- Written by: Ken Furtado
I received email notification this morning of an online auction to be conducted in August, 2022 featuring several Quaintance-related items. One of them is the original oil painting of the woman in blue pictured here and in my previous blog entry. The auction house is calling the painting Moonglow. It is described as 24x24 inches, oil on canvas, signed lower right and dated 1940. The opening bid is $4,400 plus tax, a 30% buyer's premium, and whatever it costs to ship it to the winning bidder. I will report back in a month with the actual selling price.
What's interesting about this image is that the model is, to all intents and purposes, plagiarized. In 1936, photographer William Mortensen published a book titled Monsters and Madonnas. Mortensen was a well-known and controversial photographer in the '30s, whose "obscurity today is mainly due to his championing of Pictorialism, a force within photography that promoted retouching, hand-worked negatives, chemical washes, and an artistic, painterly approach that soon faded with the advance of modernism." (Link)
Quaintance's blue female nude is an undisguised copy of the Madonna on the cover of Mortensen's book. Quaintance did little more than add the flowers!
- Written by: Ken Furtado
Early in his career, George Quaintance had a minor obsession with moonflowers. He included them in more than half a dozen paintings or drawings, always juxtaposed against a buxom female nude.
Fans and admirers of the artist may be unaware of the female nudes he painted, but he was once well-known for them. The January 1939 issue of the Chicago-based Picture and Gift Journal, contained an article claiming, "George Quaintance is the originator of the 'glamour nudes,' who have all it takes to knock 'em dead from San Diego to Bangor, from Miami to Seattle."
And what's a moonflower, anyway?
As I young man, I earned spending money mowing lawns. There was a vine growing on the patio of one client that she called a moonflower. It had fragrant, pure white blossoms the size of a saucer that opened at night.
The Internet will tell you a moonflower is a member of the Morning Glory family. Georgia O'Keeffe, who attended the same Art Students League as Quaintance (but a decade earlier) also painted them. Purists will note that not all the flowers George called moonflowers actually are moonflowers, but that would be to apply a foolish consistency.
The House of Shaw published and sold many of Quaintance's lithographs; it offered a Moonflower described as, "Moon Flower, 24x30, an artist-signed limited edition watercolor gravure of a nude in an ecstatic posture bathed in a fantasy of moon flowers and moonlight in tones of silver and blue. $20 framed from House of Shaw Decorative Arts, 801 6th Ave., NYC."
In August 2021, an online auction house offered an original Quaintance painting in the Moonflower tradition (uppermost image). The listing read, "Female Nude. Oil on canvas. 1940. 610x760 mm; 24x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto. Provenance: estate of Ray Blanco, New Jersey; private collection. Quaintance was one of the early American pioneers of kitschy, homoerotic, fantasy art. His illustrations for Physique Pictorial magazine in the early 1950s helped to popularize his work. He is most sought after for his macho, campy, muscular images of cowboys, gods, matadors and other overtly masculine, skimpily-clad, idealized physical specimens. But he was also an accomplished portrait painter and landscapist. Outside of his portraiture, there are few known images of women in his oeuvre."
The opening bid was $2,200 and the lot was estimated to fetch $3,000-$5,000 — plus a 30% buyer premium. The painting sold for an eye-opening $5,800.
- Written by: Ken Furtado
Born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1905, Greta Garbo quickly became so famous that MGM Studio billed her only as "Garbo." She may have thus been the first "mononymous" celebrity.
I have never found any evidence to indicate that she or George Quaintance ever crossed paths, but they were of similar ages and they were both in Hollywood at roughly the same time, so it's not out of the question.
- Written by: Ken Furtado
It is always an event when a new Quaintance painting surfaces or a lost canvas is found. It has been five years since a new, previously unknown painting emerged.
Meet Ramon Novarro.
Novarro lived from 1899 to 1968. He was born in Mexico, and his family moved to California in 1913 to escape the Mexican revolution. Novarro's mother claimed to be a descendant of none other than Montezuma himself! Like Quaintance, Novarro was originally a dancer. He was working as a singing waiter when he was discovered by Hollywood. The silent screen's original Ben-Hur, Novarro quickly became cinema's new Latin Lover and hottest sex symbol after the premature death of Rudolph Valentino. Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jennifer Jones, and Myrna Loy were among Novarro's illustrious costars.