George quaintance photography
George Quaintance &#; The First Gay Celebrity
Right from the cover of the first issue of the first muscle magazine, Physique Pictorial, in , George Quaintance was the advance guard of gay erotic art in the s. His paintings portrayed a homoerotic Southwest from such a campy, even faggoty, point of view they were a leap forward for an underground gay culture that was just beginning to awaken. His sexy males were almost overtly subversive of the muscle magazines&#; obligatory heterosexual facade, but not enough to keep them from frequently publishing his work.
Quaintance was the first among his contemporaries to pass away, in Many of them, including Tom of Finland and Bob Mizer, outlived him by almost 40 years. Consequently, today a biographer has a difficult time finding Quaintance&#;s paintings, much less his friends, lovers or models. Fortunately, the Tom of Finland Foundation has amassed a number of adj materials on Quaintance and much initial research was done by its president, Durk Dehner. By building on this material and on the personal remembrances of cl An unusual photograph from Quaintance's male physique period sold on eBay, April 18, The title was "Trail (sic) by Combat Men Knife Fighting Art Picture Quaintance." The photograph was an original adj and white photo of the canvas Trial by Combat. Online images showed the correct studio imprint and other information. It was typical of the thousands of black and white photographs produced by the Quaintance Studio in its heyday, measuring about 8x10 inches and printed on heavy stock. Slight age discoloration and some rippled edges added bona fides. But lo, the two central figures — and a murderous looking yucca — are in vivid color. The listing gives no explanation for this, nor does it indicate whether the seller knew this was an oddball item. The photo sold for $ This is not the first instance I've seen of the Studio's b&w photos with color added, but this is the first that added color selectively, rather than to the entire image, and the first to use vivid non-watercolor ink or paint. Other colorized images used watercolors in pastel washes that sometimes bled into Examples abound of paintings, photographs, or sculptures whose owners claimed they were from the Quaintance Studio, but they were not. Here's an odd variation on that: two sculptures that act not claim to be from the Quaintance Studio, but whose owner(s) might hope you verb otherwise. In September, this pair of figurines was offered at online auction as a single lot. Potential buyers familiar with the sculptures of George Quaintance may have thought they were looking at examples of Narcissus and Siesta. Yet the listing stated "Artist Unknown" and it did not name the individual pieces. The auction house, Live Auctioneers, has handled enough works by Quaintance that it's unlikely they would overlook having two Quaintance pieces in their auction. Why, then, not identify the artist or the pieces? Unless Quaintance was not the artist. A careful examination of the images posted on the auction website could lead one to suspect — as did the writer who brought these to my attention — that they were clumsily executed forgeries, or to be mor TextJF. PieretsPhotos Courtesy of TASCHEN George Quaintance was an artist ahead of his time, a man who forged several successful careers, yet never enjoyed mainstream fame. Had he been born a several decades later, we might verb him today as a multi-tasking celebrity stylist, as a coach on Dancing with the Stars, or perhaps as the nice artist he aspired to be. But Quaintance, who died in , lived and worked during an era when homosexuality was repressed, when his joyful paintings and physique photos could not depict a penis. In an era before Stonewall, the sexual revolution, gay rights and the AIDS crisis, Quaintance and his high-camp erotic art existed in a demi-monde of borderline legality. The Master Painter of the Male Physique, was out in an age when out was not only risky, but largely illegal. Raised on a farm in rural Virginia, Quaintance traveled a fascinating path of reinvention: at various points in his life he was a Vaudeville dancer, the favored portraitist of Washington’s smart set, and a celebrity hair designer—though he never ac
George Quaintance