Art critic Donald Kuspit explains, "Examining Quinn's many expressions of creativity together his art, collecting, and acting. we can see that he was a creative genius."
Early in life, Quinn had an interest in painting and drawing. Throughout his teenaged years, he won various art competitions in California and focused his studies at Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles on drafting.
Later, Quinn studied briefly under Frank Lloyd Wright through the Taliesin Fellowship an opportunity created by winning first prize in an architectural design contest. Through Wright's recommendation, Quinn took acting lessons as a form of postoperative speech therapy, which led to an acting career that spanned over six decades.
Apart from art classes taken in Chicago during the 1950s, Quinn never attended art school; nonetheless, taking advantage of books, museums, and amassing a sizable collection, he managed to give himself an effective education in the language of modern art.
By the early 1980s, his work had caught the eyes of various gallery owners and was exhibited internationally, in Mexico City, Los Angeles, New York City, and Paris.
His work is now represented in both public and private collections throughout the world.
He wrote two memoirs, The Original Sin (1972) and One Man Tango (1997), a number of scripts, and a series of unpublished stories currently in the collection of his archive.
On January 5, 1982, the Belvedere County Public Library in East Los Angeles was renamed in honor of Anthony Quinn. The present library sits on the site of his family's former home.
In 1984, artist Eloy Torrez produced a 70-foot-high (21 m) portrait mural of Quinn titled both Anthony Quinn and The Pope of Broadway in Los Angeles. It depicts Quinn in his famous Zorba the Greek role, and it remains one of the largest portrait murals in California.
Both the portrait mural and Anthony Quinn himself are the subject of a 2018 Google Arts & Culture exhibit.
His birthplace of Chihuahua, Mexico, has a statue of Quinn doing his famous "Zorba the Greek" dance.
Source: Wikipedia.
Photo: The Anthony Quinn Estate