George Quaintance

I was surprised and pleased to find this interesting 1952 work by George Quaintance on the Galerie au Bonheur website.  The veil fabric cover was both a censorship dodge and an artistic element.

 

Havasu Creek

I think George Quaintance was still splitting his time between

 California and Arizona when he painted Havasu Creek in 1948.

 

Cover man

Once his bodybuilding career got underway, Dan Lurie appeared on a number of magazine covers.  The left one is from 1942 and is based on the preceding photo.  The one at right is from 1947 and interesting because it is a painting that George Quaintance is said to have made from an Earle Forbes photo.

 

George Quaintance Day

Viewer and friend Michael P. helped me discover a lot of new information and images relating to George Quaintance (1902-1957) when he recently requested a series on Zaro Rossi.  Quaintance is shown here with his lover and business partner, Victor Garcia, along with an unknown woman.  Born in rural Virginia, Quaintance left home at 16 to study art and dance in New York.  He initially found work as a dancer before moving on to work as a hair dresser and eventually as an artist doing glamor fantasy nudes of women for cheesy magazines.  He met Puerto Rico native Garcia in New York, and moved with him to California around 1948 where he painted the first cover for Physique Pictorial.  It was men only from that point forward, and by 1950, the couple was in Phoenix doing Western themed work.  At some point, Quaintance taught Garcia how to do photography, and I have learned that many, if not most, of the photos attributed to Quaintance were done by Victor.

 

This stern looking Quaintance/Garcia model manages to be engaging in spite of the gruff look.

 

I made this composite to show how there could be three versions of any given George Quaintance painting.  He almost always drew or painted his models fully nude for an enhanced sense of realism, only to later paint in clothes or another sort of cover on the final version, as in this set modeled by Zaro Rossi.  Most of the time, clothing of various sorts was used, resulting in some realistic bulges and outlines.  When he first began to sell mass produced copies of his work, color reproduction was so expensive that he distributed black and white versions of his paintings.  This black and white full nude of Rossi is rare, and was probably never commercially distributed.

 

I think this is a color slide of an unknown model that Quaintance used for a painting.

A later post in this series goes into more detail on this interesting technique.

 

I don't have a title for this Quaintance painting of two men in a shower.

Note the adobe wall behind them which is a western theme that appeared regularly in his work.

 

Never one to miss an opportunity to make a buck, George Quaintance sold art lessons via ads in physique magazines.  He actually used this method himself at times, and note the shapely derriere of the "artist" in this ad.  Also, some observers credit him with raising the popularity of jeans in the 40s by featuring them prominently in quite a number of his art works.

 

If the Quaintance painting at right in this composite I made looks familiar, it's because I posted it in an earlier series. Only later did I discover the photo of Bill Bredlau at right.

 

Quaintance also worked in bronze, and this twin sculpture 

of underwater swimmers is interesting in both form and format.

 

Bob Spahn posed for this starkly lighted Quaintance/Garcia photo.

 

  Eric Pederson (real name Charles E. Putnam) was a competitive bodybuilder who posed for one of 12 covers Quaintance painted for Your Physique magazine.  He also posed semi-nude for both AMG and Spartan.  At some point, Eric and a "friend" got arrested in LA on a bum rap for grand theft auto. The story goes that when the owner of the car came to tell the cops that Eric had permission to use it, he brought a photographer (Mizer?) along.  So we have this interesting jailhouse picture.  Eric came in second to Steve Reeves in the 1947 Mr. America contest when he was only 18 and eventually went on to a fairly successful pro wrestling career.

 

If you go back and look at the preceding composite photo, you'll see a specially designed pair of trunks for bodybuilders and showoffs of various types . . . if you get my drift.  George Quaintance apparently had an entrepreneurial side, and teamed up with a company called Parr of Arizona to promote "Muscle Man Wear."  I'd love to get my hands on one of their catalogs.

 

 

This highly romanticized painting is called "Bandits."  The dusky lighting works to good effect,

 and even the sleepy guard's skin tight pants add to the eroticism.  Quaintance and Victor Garcia had an open relationship, and Quaintance has a succession of Latino lovers serve as models.

This heavily tattooed and moderately oiled Quaintance/Garcia 

model was identified by my source only as "Blahofski."

 

In addition to the fact that this is a typically good George Quaintance painting, Lake Apache has two interesting features.  First, the blond cowboy (and a number of  blond cowboys in other Quaintance paintings) is based on the artist himself.  In fact, as he aged and lost his hair, he became known for wearing blond wigs to maintain the look.  Second, the other cowboy was Zaro Rossi.

 

This whole series got instigated when Mike P.'s request for a Zaro Rossi day let me down a path to Quaintance.  So it's only appropriate to end it with a rare Quaintance color shot of Zaro.

Thanks for the inspiration, Mike!

 

Zaro Rossi is well documented to have posed for gay artist and entrepreneur George Quaintance.  In fact there is a lingering story that Zaro and some of Quaintance's other models actually broke into Quaintance's Phoenix area house, Rancho Siesta, after his death to get some photos of themselves at a wild party which were incriminating under the laws of the time.  When I first saw this photo of Rossi, I was skeptical it was Quaintance's  at first.  Then I noticed the trademark Indian blanket he is standing on, and then a few days later, I took another look at the art piece which follows in today's series.  

 

It's not hard at all to see the direct "translation" of the photo in the 

preceding image of this series into this Quaintance painting.

I used it in an earlier series to compare a photo of the horizontal model.