Erotic/Pornographic art/prints and illustrations [merged]

[mysterybadger]

Found these higher res images on the 1stDibs auction site. Only posting eight because number 9 is off the scale in terms of forum rules concerning animals...

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by mysterybadger

It's from French Nightlife Stories, posted on this very site by....(drumroll)...Mac1.

http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/t17...ries-1937.html

French Nightlife Stories is a remarkable little publication

In 1933 Bow-Man Publishing Company, located at 115 West 27th Street, produced New York Nights and French Nightlife Stories. The name "Bow-Man" combined phonetic equivalents of the last names of Sidney Boehm and Joseph Mann.

What is really amusing about it is that they've gone to quite a bit of trouble to do a rather elaborate two pages spread, with layout, typography and artwork reminiscent of the New Yorker

Take this spread



. . . Messrs Boehm and Mann, or whomever they employed (perhaps the talented "George Quintana, better known as a pinup and cover art artist, but with a lot of graphic design talent) put a lot of effort into that. Other material in it is more ordinary, but its always a surprise to see something like this, makes you wonder why they went to the trouble, perhaps to appear "not sleazy" . . . but even with the aspiration, getting things to look as good as this means that someone involved was a skilled graphic artist layout man. Special points for the "historiated initial" M that begins the piece . . .



Or take this page



another historiated initial and a complicated mixed typeface layout, try randomly dotting your text with italics and see if it looks like this!

it won't

[potterstoke]

Just to complete the set posted by Deepsepia and Mysterybadger.


There were 10 images altogether and as Mysterybadger has mentioned, one of those images breaks this Forum's rules.

[deepsepia]

A prominent artist in his day, he did a series of prints during the First World War on military themes. This drew notice in high places, and he apparently became the drawing instructor and friend to Kronprinz Wilhelm -- the Kaiser's son and heir.

Max Bruning: After the surrender of Germany at the end of the First World War the democratic institution known as the Weimar Republic was instituted. It remained in power until the devastating effects of the Depression brought about the even more disastrous rise of the Nazis during the mid 1930's. Yet in the 1920's decade, Germany (most notably Berlin) was a most liberal and avant guarde centre in Europe. The Arts were unfettered by either social or political restrictions. Thus in this atmosphere such artists as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Willy Jaeckel and Max Bruning devoted much of their talents to this art.

Max Bruning's art dealt almost entirely with the many elements of phisical desire. During the 1920's his watercolours were reproduced as 'naughty' postcards and imagery for advertising. He dedicated his more serious talents, however, to the creation of original etchings and drypoint engravings, some of which were finished with extra layers of colours. "Haunted", for example, contains two extra printings of green and yellow lines and tones which increases the psychological intensity of this amazing work of art.

Max Bruning's eventful life is almost as compelling as his art. He attended the Leipzig Academy of Art at the young age of fifteen and studied both painting and printmaking techniques there under Alois Kolb and Peter Halm. Upon completion of his studies, Max Bruning contributed drawings to the periodical, Ex-Libris (1910). He also first exhibited his art in Munich during that year. In the First World War (1914-1918), Max Bruning was commissioned as a war artist. Shortly after the war ended he settled in Berlin and began to create the wonderfully provoking engravings for which he is famous. As the Weimar era became increasingly threatened by the rise of the Nazis, however, Max Bruning moved to the Tyrol Mountains in Austria. He remained there during the entire Second World War. In 1943, Allied bombing attacks upon Berlin destroyed most of the remaining original copper plates of Max Bruning's engravings. When the war ended in 1945, Max Bruning, a classified German citizen, was forced to leave Austria. He settled in Lindau in the following year and opened a studio. Most of his art from this period is landscape paintings and watercolours.

Note that this bio strategically omits his well known illustrations of NS subjects, like a famous portrait of Hitler!

Some of these examples are unfortunately very small-- if I can find better, I'll replace.

[tombed]

Originally Posted by mysterybadger

It's from French Nightlife Stories, posted on this very site by....(drumroll)...Mac1

Thanks for tracking this down, MB.
Here are some covers.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by tombed

Thanks for tracking this down, MB.
Here are some covers.

Cover art for French Nightlife stories was mostly by George Quaintance (aka "Quintana"). A talented guy, his pinup art is in the style of Enoch Bolles, from whose work his can be hard to distinguish; when not signed, the particular magazine will be the biggest clue as to whose it is. He's also known for early gay pinup art-- and his work is highly collected.

I _suspect_ he's the guy responsible for the interesting typography and layout that I noted above. Reason being-- he signs his name in different ways, always intricately lettered, and he often makes a clever elaboration of his own initial Q. Its not much to go on, obviously, but he clearly was thinking a lot about lettering and type-- which was not typically an interest of illustrators. Artists did have distinctive ways to sign there own names, part of their brand, but no one had as many ways of doing it as Quintana.

Beyond that, he was talented and successful in all kinds of endeavors, and seemed interest in pretty much everything aesthetic-- his biography suggests a range of talents that his Bolles-like pinups don't, a guy who could do pretty much anything he set his mind to.



What makes him important though is his "he man" homoerotic art. He's an early and influential gay artist. You can see his influence on a lot of better known gay artists who come later, notably Tom of Finland.



There was a detailed biography on the GLBTQ Encyclopedia -- its now archived, so I'll copy it here, because its interesting and hard to find at this point

Originally Posted by GLBTQ Encyclopedia

Although now obscure, George Quaintance was one of the most influential figures in a unique American style of art and one of the most flamboyant and interesting gay characters for four decades of the twentieth century.

Though few people outside the gay world know it, Quaintance was a pioneer of male physique painting. This genre heralded a new American gay consciousness in the early 1950s.

Born June 3, 1902, in the tiny rural community of Page County, Virginia, Quaintance left home to study art in New York City in 1920. At age 18, he began studies at the prestigious Art Students League, which counted Georgia O'Keeffe among its graduates. His teachers included Ashcan School founder Robert Henri and the Polish-born American expressionist Max Weber.

Quaintance's drawing and painting soon took second place among his multiple artistic interests, however. He became enamored of the ballet and other dance forms. He studied with some of the great Russian émigré ballet dancers then in New York.

By 1928, Quaintance led classical and jazz dance instruction with friend and teacher, Sonia Serova. He also danced with a touring vaudeville group, the Collegiates. Quaintance's dance obsession led to a startling twist in his life. When his dance partner, Frances Craig, became ill, he met Miriam Chester, a classically trained ballerina. They formed a "professional partnership" and in August 1929, they married.

Both the marriage and partnership were short-lived. By July 4, 1930, Quaintance was pictured in the Washington Evening Star with a new partner, listed only by her first name, Karen.

From his teen years, Quaintance was obviously and actively homosexual. However, he was quite discreet and totally closeted among family, friends, and adoring fans in his native Virginia, repeating a pattern then quite common of gay men who left home in order to lead a homosexual life. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Quaintance often returned to Page County to direct musical revues and stage presentations using local talent.

In 1938, he spent an extended time in his hometown with his new lover, a handsome young native Puerto Rican named Victor Garcia. Garcia became the artist's model, life partner, and business associate until Quaintance's untimely death, despite the coming and going of several other handsome young Hispanic lovers.

Quaintance's sexual orientation aside, women always played significant roles in his life. He adored his mother, Ella Belle, and she doted upon him in turn. She even convinced him to create a mural for her church in 1933. Quaintance, who sometimes used himself as a model, appears as a handsome blond man at the feet of Christ. The colorful mural still reigns over the baptismal font at a Baptist church in Stanley, Virginia.

Women, in general, sparked the next unexpected phase in the artist's career. An article in Quaintance's hometown newspaper in 1938 boasted that he was "acclaimed as America's foremost coiffure designer." In addition, the artist had turned his formidable talents to all sorts of popular design--stage sets, elegant interiors, department store windows on New York's Fifth Avenue, women's makeup, and, most notably, hair designs.

He created elaborate hairdos for Gloria Swanson, Jeannette MacDonald, Lily Pons, dozens of other Hollywood stars, New York socialites, and the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. His styles, some adapted for the heads of his male models, created beauty-parlor sensations across America as the 1930s ended.

In the meantime, Quaintance had added photography to his list of accomplishments, gaining lessons and experience from such well-known New York photographers as Edwin Townsend and Lon Hanagan (Lon of New York, 1911-1999). The latter became a pioneer of the "beefcake" school of photography whose models in the 1940s included male physique icon and dancer Tony Sansone and Quaintance's own well-muscled lover, Garcia.

In a 1996 interview for Torso Magazine, Lon reported that to make his male nudes suitable for his first photography catalogue in 1941, he called upon "the touch of groundbreaking gay painter George Quaintance, a friend and neighbor of Lon's who would pop over and paint luminous (fig) leaves directly on Lon's prints" to cover the models' genitals.

Despite his success in photography and other fields, Quaintance never abandoned his painting.

In January 1939, an article in Picture and Gift Journal declared the artist's paintings of female figures " 'glamour nudes' who have all it takes to 'knock 'em dead' . . . ."

n fact, the artist's most startling "glamour nudes" were still on the horizon and they were not females.

Before Quaintance turned to his hallmark erotic representations of male nudes, he earned a reputation as a portrait artist of the rich and famous, including Washington, D. C. diplomats, Hollywood luminaries, and other notables.


In 1951, Quaintance was among the leaders in the new publishing phenomenon that photographers like Lon Hanagan had foreshadowed in the 1940s.

The very first cover illustration for Bob Mizer's pioneering magazine, Physique Pictorial, was a painting by Quaintance of a near nude youth astride a galloping stallion, a shocking new image of "the perfect man." For the next six years, the artist was prominently featured in Physique Pictorial.

To pursue this new direction, Quaintance and Garcia had moved to the West coast around 1948. After a few years in Los Angeles, they set up a studio in Phoenix, Arizona sometime in the early 1950s.

"Rancho Siesta," Quaintance's idealized Western abode, was neither a ranch nor did it allow much time for an artist's siesta. It was a busy center of the artist's new obsession, the classic male physique. Located in the Aztec Park residential subdivision of Phoenix, "Rancho Siesta" was where the artist created his now-prized paintings--some 60 oil-on-canvas works--in fewer than six years.

Quaintance taught Garcia the fine points of capturing discreet male nudes on film. At the same time, he began painting the series of large oil paintings depicting robust cowboys, well-muscled Indians, and male nudes from classical antiquity and myth. The paintings show naked and near-naked men, all exemplifying Quaintance's "ideal physique" in dramatic settings.

Taking advantage of the new burst of gay consciousness in post-World War II America, Quaintance and Garcia began marketing black-and-white photographs of his near-nude models and color prints of the paintings. In 1953, he wrote a friend that "business has grown to fantastic proportions in the last few months and truly I'm practically out of my mind trying to keep up with it."

The works he sold by mail offer no display of genitals except in the tight confines of Levi jeans, an image first popularized by Quaintance, or through filmy materials in strategic positions. The apparently innocent surfaces in surrealistic bright colors seethe with homoeroticism.

The images are far from pornographic; they are even tame by current social standards. Nevertheless, their controversial gay content and message prevented Quaintance from being judged in the mainstream art world. His only gallery exhibition occurred when a friend loaned Quaintance's painting, The Crusader, for a display of works of contemporary American artists in the late 1950s.

One of the first of the iconic masterpieces, Night in the Desert--1951, portrays a reclining nude cowboy, well-honed musculature gleaming in the moonlight and blond hair perfectly coiffed. He is proffering a lighted match to a cigarette in the mouth of the dark handsome youth lying next to him, suggesting a shared post-coital moment. In the background, two equally hyper-masculine cowboys face each other clad only in Levis, legs provocatively spread.

In this and other paintings in the series, the blond cowboy strongly resembles the artist himself, an egotist who kept in excellent physical shape even after his dancing career ended. When his thinning hair failed to match his standard of grooming perfection, Quaintance took to wearing elaborate wigs, often with comic results for those who detected the ruse.

For example, a neighbor of the artist's mother wrote in a daily journal on September 13, 1938 when Quaintance was home for a visit: "I wonder whether he knows I study his wig so closely. It is a wig; the hair is reddish and getting thin. I can see the cloth base, like burlap or something; anyone would know those hairs didn't grow in flesh."

But Quaintance's personal vanity was part of the mix that lent a unique quality to his oil paintings. A blond Quaintance clone stands prominently with three dark-skinned Latino cowboys in the 1954 painting, Saturday Night. All four studs leaning against the bar wear skin-tight Levis, one displaying a prominent bulge in the crotch.

Such paintings proved inspirational for other gay art pioneers of the late 1950s, including the famous Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen), who praised Quaintance's images in published interviews.

Interest in these pioneering works of art grew in the insular gay milieu of the mid-century, reaching all the way to Europe. In 1954, Quaintance photographs and prints appeared in Der Kreis, a magazine published in Switzerland and one of the first overtly gay publications in the world.

Quaintance's work continued to be prominently featured in the American physique magazines that flowered in the wake of Bob Mizer's Physique Pictorial, including Grecian Guild Pictorial, Adonis, Olympic Arts, Demigods, Vim, and Young Physique.

All of these were thinly-disguised homoerotic publications aimed at gay men, a potentially lucrative but dangerous market. To avoid anti-gay and anti-porn laws, these magazines assumed the lofty ideal of male health and physical development.


In 1953, Quaintance painted a series based on bull-fighting with a dark, handsome matador. The model was Angel Avila, one of several swarthy Latinos who became the artist's lover outside of his continuing relationship with his first love, Victor Garcia. In a letter to a friend dated April 27, 1953, Quaintance wrote that the paintings "were done in turmoil, in passion--I might even say in emotional agony."

This trio of paintings--Preludio, Gloria, and Moribundo--may have reflected the course of the love affair from its prelude to its physical fulfillment to its death-like ending. The paintings are among the best in the Quaintance oeuvre, rising above the almost cartoon-like depictions of cowboys and Roman slaves.

Quaintance was not one to mourn the loss of a lover for long. Soon he was enamored of a new Latino hunk and a new objet de la richesse: his single-named model, Edwardo, who posed for sculptures as well as photos and paintings. In a hasty note to a friend in May 1954, Quaintance said: "Am getting started now on some little figurines to add to the business. . . . Of course, Eddie [Edwardo] is posing for them. He is my dream-come-true."

The "Rancho Siesta" household in 1956 consisted of the artist, the gorgeous Edwardo, Victor, and Victor's new companion, Tom Syphers, a tall blond of aristocratic bearing from Utah. Another blond hunk, Ron Nyman, had joined the business firm earlier, but his name was soon scratched from the studio's letterhead.

The pace of the photo and print business became frantic. Quaintance worked night and day to complete commissions for magazines and to keep pace with mail orders for photos and prints. The artist could not survive the heavy demands placed upon him. On November 8, 1957, he suffered a heart attack and died at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 55.

In reporting Quaintance's death, Mizer described him as "a perfectionist (who) drove himself unmercifully, slaving days and nights on end (taking Benzedrine to stay awake) to finish a painting or a sculpture piece." Mizer's tribute concluded with the kind of hyperbole one might expect in a eulogy, but which recognizes the artist as a pioneer: "Throughout the world, he has been acclaimed as the trailblazer of a culture which has been almost ignored for 20 centuries."

Quaintance's legacy includes the 60-plus signature oil paintings now held in private collections and a few gay-oriented museum collections around the world. He also produced thousands of art prints, photographs, sculptures, and other original designs, including glamorized life masks of twentieth-century icons such as Marlene Dietrich. These ephemera have largely disappeared, with only a cache of salvaged prints and photographs surfacing here and there. Occasionally, a painting will pop up at public auction or prints will be offered at eBay and other online sites.

A brief obituary in Quaintance's hometown newspaper in 1957 reported that "In accordance with his request the body was cremated and no funeral services were held." Victor Garcia and Tom Syphers inherited Quaintance's estate.

[mysterybadger]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

C
He's an early and influential gay artist

OK I suppose some of his stuff could be be seen as a teeny bit gay:



What I find fascinating is that images such as the one below were openly featured in the 1950s in magazines like Young Physique, which succesfully masqueraded as "body building" mags with ads for bar bells and supplements and everything...were people blind or did they just turn a blind eye?

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by mysterybadger

What I find fascinating is that images such as the one below were openly featured in the 1950s in magazines like Young Physique, which succesfully masqueraded as "body building" mags with ads for bar bells and supplements and everything...were people blind or did they just turn a blind eye?

Oh, they knew. At least, gays knew what they were looking at; most straight folks didn't. Remember, this was an odd closeted world in which Liberace "hadn't found the right girl yet". Indeed, as his bio notes, Quaintence himself did marry a woman, presumably because he thought that's what he ought to do. This isn't all that far off, if you remember Elton John and Renate Blauel.

There _was_ a straight bodybuilding culture, men like Bernarr McFadden; he's the inspiration for both Jack LaLanne and Charles Atlas. Early 20th century Americans were underfed by our standards, and would look scrawny to someone in 2019. Magazines were filled with advertisements for goods to build up the "98 pound weakling" who gets sand kicked in his face, so bodybuilding itself wasn't obviously gay.

Quaintence was full on gay, but he plainly knew how not to run afoul of contemporary standards. Basically, if you didn't show male genitalia, or man on man action, it couldn't be seen as obscene.

He does two very different kinds of work. There are his magazine images-- which are almost always just one guy. The more suggestive works are paintings that he did for himself -- now heavily collected in the gay community-- and drawings. These are often group scenes, and there's an obvious awareness of an interaction between the characters



Note the black and white drawing of the sailor, hand on the "ship's wheel" . . . that was as close as Quaintance got to explicit, and I don't think this was published anywhere at the time (?)



But in the gay world, once senses that his less suggestive illustrations were still enough to signal a view of the world that others similarly inclined recognized.

In another thread I've posted some issues of "Brevities" a 1930s pulp magazine which has very frank -- and very homophobic-- stories about gay life, particularly in New York and Hollywood.
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...76#post4916976

One gets the idea that for people like Quaintence, the way they found out about their own world was often to hear it denounced.

[tombed]

Some more Vertès.

As well as the more explicit works of the prodigious Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Vertès also produced illustrations for several of Louÿs' less contentious titles, including the ever-popular Les aventures du Roi Pausole. Having said 'less contentious', Vertès actually produced illustrations for two versions of Roi Pausole, the first in 1930 with 74 engravings plus fifteen 'planches refusées' (rejected plates) which included a number of imagined scenes even more risqué than Louÿs had in mind for the liberal-minded inhabitants of Tryphême. This was a limited edition of 99 copies published 'Aux dépens d’un amateur' (at the expense of a private collector), and is now very rare. Fortunately most of the Vertès illustrations for Roi Pausole were reproduced two years later in a much more affordable edition, and including mostly only those illustrating actual scenes from Louÿs' narrative. Compared with many of the Pausole illustrators, Vertès brings a lightness and joy to Louÿs' Mediterranean paradise, with instantly recognisable touches like newspaper stands, bus stops and resort hotels. The 1932 Vertès-illustrated Roi Pausole was published by Editions du Cap, Monte Carlo, in their 'Les fermiers generaux' series, and printed in a limited edition of 5,000 numbered copies.

[deepsepia]

Best known as an illustrator for superhero comics, Cho is an astonishing draftsman -- perhaps the most talented artist in ballpoint pen, a medium that demands that you know exactly what you're doing -- and he's also got a taste for snarky humor.

It today's PC world, some feel the need to apologize for the babes (and dudes) poured into skin tight latex, but Cho thinks it fun, and the outrage is even funnier. His pinups are all the more interesting for being so not-PC.