- Written by: Ken Furtado
Over the course of his career, Quaintance used two basically different signatures. Initially, he painted his surname in squarish letters that ran vertically down the canvas. This remained his signature of choice until about 1942, when he adopted the signature most often associated with him: his last name printed horizontally, with exaggerated descenders on the "Q" and "T." The example shown (right, second from top) is an actual scan from the canvas After the Storm.
Sometimes, especially on magazine covers, he would use only the letter "Q" by itself.
For his sculptures, he used a stylus to scratch his name into the drying hydrostone, the plaster-of-Paris-like material that he favored for casting.
His actual signature is shown for comparison.
- Written by: Ken Furtado
In the years of
research leading to publication of the George Quaintance biography, perhaps the most amazing discovery was one that relates closely to the town the artist called home as a child.
Living next door to the residence of Quaintance’s parents in the small town of Stanley, Virginia was William S. Kibler. Only nine years younger than Quaintance, Kibler kept a close eye on the artist’s career over the years. In an interview shortly before his death at age 90 in 2002, Kibler claimed to remember little of his association with Quaintance. Instead, he mentioned a daily journal he had kept since his early college years that might contain some clues to the artist’s life.
- Written by: Ken Furtado
There is a lot o
f downright wrong information about George Quaintance to be found online, and it muddies the historical record. Unfortunately, the end user has no way of knowing what data is accurate and what is not. Such is the case with the alleged portrait of Rita Hayworth.
This full-sized canvas first appeared on eBay in late 2005, described as "Rare RITA HAYWORTH Life Size OIL PAINTING by QUAINTANCE." The opening bid was a jaw-dropping $1,950,000 — nearly two million dollars!
I am fortunate to have had access to Quaintance's many scrapbooks. Over the course of his life, he clipped and pasted any magazine or newspaper article in which his name appeared, usually underlining his name in ink. He also pasted sketches, drawings, photographs of his paintings and sculptures, notes about his works and more. That included photos of the many glamour portraits he painted for diplomats, stars of stage and film, politicians and their families, and many luminaries of L.A. and Washington, D.C. society.
- Written by: Ken Furtado
In 1989, German publisher Ja
nssen-Verlag printed The Art of George Quaintance, an 80-page paperback with black and white illustrations of many Quaintance works. It included a brief biography written by publisher Volker Janssen. The book has been reprinted twice and is still in print. Until 2010, it was the only work about Quaintance ever published and it contains errors and inaccuracies. In 2010, Taschen published Quaintance, a large format art book with full-color reproductions of Quaintance's iconic male physique canvases and a brief biography. It's a spectacular book but the biographical data is sparse.
In 1996, Richard Hawkins, a Los Angeles artist, created a Web site partly devoted to Quaintance. The site incorporated personal research, along with archival information from the Tom of Finland Foundation. Hawkins expressed his hope to write an authoritative biography, but the subsequent loss of much of his material in a computer crash and a change of career led to him abandoning plans for a biography.
Hawkins was not the first to undertake a biography of Quaintance. In the early 1980s, a San Francisco writer named Ted Smith founded a nonprofit organization called the National Gay Art Archives, with George Quaintance foremost among the artists whose work they hoped to preserve. Smith contributed articles — also full of misinformation — to many gay periodicals of the time. He intended to write a biography, but his life was cut short by AIDS and today there is no vestige of the National Gay Art Archives.
- Written by: Ken Furtado
George Quintana was a well-known pin-up girl artist of the 1930s, specializing in pulp magazine covers. Little or nothing is known of his personal history, in spite of the fact that he is mentioned in every major work published about pin-up art of the 20th century. Reports in books and on the Internet cite him as being one of the top three illustrators in income, earning $50K annually, and mentioning his particular popularity in France.
Because of the similarity between the names George Quintana and George Quaintance, because they both were known to sign their names with exaggerated descenders on the letters Q and T, and because they both sometimes signed Geo rather then George, it has long been assumed by many that they were one and the same person. Quintana is also the name by which Tom of Finland refers to Quaintance in the film documentary Daddy & the Muscle Academy.