Tom of Finland
Tom of Finland (✦May 8, 1920 - †November 7, 1991) (born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland) was a fetish artist notable for his stylized homoerotic art and his influence on late twentieth-century gay culture. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits: heavily muscled torsos, limbs, and buttocks, and improbably large penises. Tight or partially removed clothing showed off these traits, with penises often visible as distinct bulges in tight trousers or prominently displayed for the viewer. His drawings frequently featured two or more men either immediately preceding or during explicit sexual activity.
Life and career
At 19, Laaksonen moved from his native Kaarina to Helsinki to attend art school. It was here where he began to sketch his first homoerotic drawings, based on images of masculine Finnish laborers he had seen from an early age. Finland, however, soon became embroiled in the Winter War with the USSR, and then formally involved in World War II, and Laaksonen was inducted into the Finnish Army. After the war, Laaksonen returned to civilian life and worked in the advertising industry, continuing to draw on the side. In 1957, he submitted some of his homoerotic drawings to the influential American magazine Physique Pictorial for publication under the pseudonym of "Tom of Finland" to avoid scrutiny in his home country. Laaksonen reportedly chose the English name Tom as it resembles his given name Touko.
Laaksonen's work soon garnered attention from the gay community at large, and by 1973, he was both publishing erotic comic books and infiltrating the mainstream art world. He was best known for works that focused on homomasculine archetypes such as lumberjacks, motorcycle policemen, sailors, businessmen, bikers, and leathermen. His most prominent comic series are the "Kake" comics, which included these archetypal characters in abundance.
Exhibitions of Laaksonen's work began in the 1970s and in 1973 he gave up his full-time job at the Helsinki office of international advertising firm McCann-Erickson. "Since then I've lived in jeans and lived on my drawings," is how he described the lifestyle transition which occurred during this period.
In 1979, Laaksonen founded the Tom of Finland Company to collect and distribute his work. This company exists to the present day and has expanded into a non-profit foundation dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting homoerotic artwork. In the late 1990s, the company introduced a fashion line based on his works, which covers a wide array of looks besides the typified cutoff jeans-and-jacket style of his drawings. The fashion line balances the original homoeroticism of the drawings with mainstream fashion culture, and their runway shows occur in many of the venues during the same times as other fashion companies.
Before his death, Laaksonen was the subject of the Finnish documentary Daddy and the Muscle Academy - The Art, Life, and Times of Tom of Finland. The European arthouse publisher Taschen has published various collections of his work including three 'Retrospective' Anthologies.
Controversy and artistic appreciation
During his lifetime and beyond, Laaksonen's work has drawn both admiration and disdain from different quarters of the artistic community. Laaksonen developed a friendship with gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe whose work depicting sadomasochism and fetish iconography was also subject to controversy.
A controversial theme in his drawings was the erotic treatment of men in Nazi uniforms. They form a small part of his overall work, but the typically flattering visual treatment of these characters has led some viewers to infer a sympathy or affinity for Nazism, and they have been omitted from most recent anthologies of his work. Later in his career Laaksonen disavowed this work and was at pains to dissociate himself and his work from fascist or racist ideologies. He also depicted a significant number of black men in his drawings, with no overt racial or political message in the context in which they appear; although they bear some commonality with racist caricatures of the "hypersexual" black male, these traits are shared by Laaksonen's white characters as well.
There have been mixed views within the art critic community about Laaksonen's contribution. His closely detailed drawing technique has led to him being described as a 'master with a pencil', while in contrast, a reviewer for Dutch newspaper Het Parool described his work as 'illustrative but without expressivity'.
There is considerable argument over whether his depiction of 'supermen' (male characters with huge sexual organs and muscles) is facile and distasteful, or whether there is a deeper complexity in the work which plays with and subverts those stereotypes. For example, some critics have noted examples of apparent tenderness between traditionally tough, masculine characters, or playful smiles in sado-masochistic scenes.
In either case, there remains a large constituency who admire the work on a purely utilitarian basis, as described by Rob Meyer, owner of a leather shop and art gallery in Amsterdam, 'These works are not conversation pieces, they're masturbation pieces'.
Cultural impact and legacy
Arguably Laaksonen's work revived and commercialized an underground leather counter-culture that emerged after World War II and reached its height in the late 1970s and early 1980s before the emergence of AIDS in the gay community.
The apparel, styling, and demeanor adopted by large numbers of gay men during that period appear to be derived directly from his work (for example, Glenn Hughes of the Village People). Although the prevalence of this 'look' has declined since the mid-1980s, Laaksonen's work continues to be used extensively in gay publications, bars, clubs, and online communities who associate with its erotic subject matter. The combination of cap, leather jacket, and mustache became known in the pop culture of the Western world as a visual stereotype of gay men (see Police Academy movie series).
In the late 1970s, clothes designer Vivienne Westwood appropriated Laaksonen's art for t-shirts which were featured at SEX, the store run by Westwood and partner Malcolm McLaren. The t-shirts were modeled for photographs by Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, becoming an iconic part of punk history in the process.
In the later 1980s, artist G.B. Jones began a series of drawings called the "Tom Girls" that appropriated both Tom of Finland's drawings and Vivienne Westwood's exploitation of them. The drawings were done in the style of Tom of Finland and based on his drawings but featured punk girls or other subculturally identified women. However, unlike Tom's drawings, in Jones' work, the authority figures exist only to be undermined, not obeyed. The two artists showed together in New York City in the early 1990s.
In 1999, an exhibition took place at the Institut Culturel Finlandais (Finnish Cultural Centre) in Paris. In 2004, the New York Museum of Modern Art inducted several examples of Laaksonen's artwork into its permanent collection.
Bibliography
- F.Valentine Hooven: Tom of Finland: His Life and Times: New York: St Martins Press: 1993: < ISBN:031209325X Buy it from Amazon.com >
- Dian Hanson (ed) Tom of Finland: The Comic Collection (Five Volumes): Koln: London: Taschen: 2005: < ISBN:3822383497 Buy it from Amazon.com >
- Mischa Ramakers: Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity, and Homosexuality: New York: Saint Martins Press: 2001: BuyBook|031227694}}
- Mischa Ramakers (ed) Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure: Koln: London: Taschen: 1998: < ISBN:3822885983 Buy it from Amazon.com >
Videography
Ilppo Pohjola (author): Kari Paljakha and Alvaro Pardo (producers): Daddy and the Muscle Academy: Tom of Finland: United Kingdom: Oracle Home Entertainment: 2002 Duration of Feature: 93 Minutes. Also features frames of Laaksonen's graphic art. Restricted to audiences over eighteen years of age.
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