Quaintance: The Short Life of an American Art Pioneer

Gay artist George Quaintance (1902-1957) had a diverse and colorful career. After attending art school with Georgia O'Keeffe and Alexander Calder, he joined a vaudeville troupe and traveled the country. His troupe, The Collegiates, was known for acrobatics and athleticism, and it was the opening act for Sophie Tucker's farewell performance. George went on to study ballet and various forms of modern dance, both choreographing and starring in theatrical performances and earning money by dancing with various partners in bars and nightclubs. Sidelined by an injury, George turned to hairstyling, becoming one of America's pre-eminent stylists, whose clients included stage and screen stars Marlene Dietrich, Lily Pons, Helen Hayes, Jeanette MacDonald and Hedy Lamarr. During this time he also painted formal portraits of celebrities, diplomats and socialites. George combined his fashion sense and painting skills as Art Editor for a series of popular women's magazines in the late 1930s and 1940s. This in turn led to his becoming the Art Editor for a new bodybuilding publication, Your Physique, published by Canadian brothers Ben and Joe Weider. George's introduction to the nascent bodybuilding community and his everyday contacts with spectacular male specimens caused a seismic shift in his career interests, and he began to paint the male nude. ("Nude" needs to be qualified, since in George's time, any depiction of frontal male nudity would get you thrown in jail.) George operated studios in Hollywood and in Phoenix, Arizona. Peopled with handsome cowboys, fabled Rancho Siesta was the Arizona studio where George Quaintance lived and worked. It was an ingenious and overwhelmingly successful marketing concept. And, in the minds and hearts of Quaintance’s legions of admirers, it was the closest the American West ever came to an honest-to-goodness incarnation of Xanadu or Shangri La. Today, George is best known for a group of about 50 iconic male physique paintings he produced from 1943 to 1957. Despite the fact that he was a precursor to, and an influence on, famed erotic illustrators Tom of Finland and Vargas, an authoritative biography of Quaintance has never been published. This biography thus fills a cultural, historical and academic void for this seminal 20th century artist. We are especially excited to have exclusive access to hundreds of never-before-published photographs from Quaintance’s personal scrapbooks and his family's archives.