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- 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.
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- 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.