GEORGE QUAINTANCE

Artist and Pioneer

Quaintance in his Vaudeville days Photo courtesy of the Tom of Finland Foundation

The name George Quaintance was familiar in the secretive, insular world of gay high society in the 1950s. But his brief fame faded, his reputation confined to a few ardent collectors of male physique art of that period. A new interest in this unique and talented man blossomed in the 1980s and '90s with a resurgence of '50s "beefcake" art and photography in print and on the Internet.

In 1989, German publisher Janssen-Verlag (http://www.janssenbooks.co.za/info.html) released The Art of George Quaintance, an 80-page paperback with black and white illustrations of many Quaintance works. A brief biography was written by publisher Volker Janssen himself. A 2003 reprint of the book has just been issued and can be ordered online.

Six years after Janssen's book, Beefcake by F. Valentine Hooven was a popular seller for German publisher Taschen (http://www.taschen.com). The 166-page soft cover book printed in large format featured the Quaintance painting Point Loma on its cover and numerous color images of his artworks and photography.

Interest in Quaintance, his art and life took a quantum jump on the Internet in 1996, when Richard Hawkins, a Los Angeles artist then associated with the Tom of Finland Foundation, created a Web site partly devoted to the artist. His information incorporated archival materials collected by Foundation president, Durk Dehner, and much personal research. Hawkins hoped to write an authoritative biography and expressed this on his site.

"Wind Blown"—one of several masques created by Quaintance in 1938

In 1998, retired newspaper editor John Waybright, who lived in Quaintance's birthplace county in Virginia, found the Hawkins material in an Internet search to identify the creator of two pencil drawings he owned which were signed by the artist. The two corresponded by e-mail and Waybright began a concerted search for information.

In Arizona, at about the same time, Ken Furtado, the webmaster for two Phoenix-based GLBT publications, Echo Magazine (www.echomag.com) and X-Factor (www.xfactor.com), and a long-time admirer of Quaintance's work, discovered Hawkins' Web site. Furtado traveled to Los Angeles to meet Hawkins, offering research assistance in Phoenix, the site of Quaintance's fabled "Rancho Siesta" and the artist's place of residence during most of the final six years of his life.

Years later, in 2002, Furtado came across a collection of Quaintance photographs at an estate sale and wondered what had become of the proposed Hawkins biography. An Internet search led him to John Waybright, and once the two of them determined that Hawkins had abandoned his project, Furtado and Waybright quickly agreed to pick up the gauntlet and collaborate on a definitive biography.

Quaintance portrait of Steve Reeves, Mr. America 1947

Please return to this page for updated news and images of The George Quaintance Project.
    If you can contribute information, please e-mail Ken (kfurtado@surfbest.net) or John (waybrightj@earthlink.net) directly. They would especially like to hear from owners of Quaintance paintings or sculptures; from people who can help them to document the existence (or loss) of Quaintance's work; and from people who can provide first-hand anecdotal information or physical documents such as correspondence, journals and so forth.