Tom of Finland
Encyclopedia
Touko Laaksonen, best known by his pseudonym
Tom of Finland (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991) was a Finnish artist notable for his stylized androerotic and fetish art and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade.
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 large penis
es. Tight or partially removed clothing showed off these traits, with the penis often visible as a bulge in tight trousers or prominently displayed for the viewer. His drawings frequently feature two or more men either immediately preceding or during explicit sexual activity. Nearly all of his characters were versatile and obviously enjoyed the bottom as well as the top role in sexual intercourse
.
, a city in southwestern Finland
, near the city of Turku
.
He studied in Turku and in 1939 he moved to the country's capital Helsinki
to study advertising, he also started drawing erotic images for his own pleasure. He first kept his drawings hidden, but then destroyed them "at least by the time I went to serve the army". His drawings were based on images of masculine laborers he had seen from an early age. The country soon became embroiled in the Winter War
with the USSR, and then formally involved in World War II
. He was conscripted in February 1940 into the Finnish Army
. He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of a second lieutenant. He later attributed his fetishistic interest in uniformed men to encounters with men in army uniform, especially soldiers of the German Wehrmacht serving in Finland at that time. After the war, in 1945, he returned to studies at the art college.
Laaksonen's artwork of this period compared to later works is considered more romantic and softer with "gentle-featured shapes and forms". The men featured were middle-class compared to the lower-class sailors, bikers, lumberjacks, construction workers, etc. of his later work. Another key difference is the lack of dramatic compositions, self-assertive poses, muscular bodies and "detached exotic settings" that his later work embodied.
at work. The editor of the magazine credited them to Tom of Finland. The cover image included a third workingman in the background watching the two log drivers. Pulled from Finnish mythology of lumberjacks representing strong masculinity, Laaksonen emphasized and privileged "homoerotic potentiality [...] relocating it in a gay context", a strategy repeated throughout his career.
Post World War II saw the rise of the biker culture as rejecting "the organization and normalization of life after the war, with its conformist, settled lifestyle." Biker subculture was both marginal and oppositional and provided postwar gay men with a stylized masculinity that included rebelliousness and danger which were absent from dominant gay stereotypes. In mainstream culture the strongest image of gay men was generally the effeminate sissy
as seen in vaudeville and films going back to the first years of the industry. Laaksonen was influenced by images of bikers as well as artwork of George Quaintance
and Etienne
, among others, that he cited as his precursors; they were "disseminated to gay readership through homoerotic physique magazines" starting in 1950. Laaksonen's drawings of bikers and leathermen
capitalized on the leather and denim
outfits which differentiated those men from mainstream culture and suggested they were untamed, physical, and self-empowered. This is contrasted with the mainstream, medical and psychological sad and sensitive young gay man who is passive. Laaksonen's drawings of this time "can be seen as consolidating an array of factors, styles and discourses already existing in the 1950s gay subcultures," this may have led to them being widely distributed and popularized in gay culture.
codes that restricted depiction of "overt homosexual acts." His work was published in the beefcake
genre that began in the 1930s and predominantly featured photographs of attractive, muscular young men in athletic poses often shown demonstrating exercises. Their primary market was gay men, but because of the conservative and homophobic
social culture of the era gay pornography
was illegal and the publications were typically presented as dedicated to physical fitness and health. They were often the only connection that closeted
men had to their sexuality. By this time however Laaksonen was rendering private commissions so more explicit work was produced but remained unpublished.
In the 1962 case of MANual Enterprises v. Day
the United States Supreme Court ruled that nude male photographs were not obscene. Softcore
gay pornography magazines and films featuring fully nude models, some of them tumescent
, quickly appeared and the pretense of being about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the 1960s the market for beefcake magazines collapsed. Laaksonen was able to publish his more overtly homoerotic work and it changed the context with "new possibilities and conventions for displaying frontal male nudity in magazines and movies." Laaksonen reacted by publishing more explicit drawings and stylized his figures' fantastical aspects with exaggerated physical aspects, particularly their genitals and muscles.
He is best known for works that focused on homomasculine archetypes such as lumberjacks, motorcycle
policemen, sailors, bikers, and leathermen. His most prominent comic series are the "Kake" comics, which included these archetypal characters in abundance.
s and making inroads to the mainstream art world with exhibitions. In 1973 he gave up his full-time job at the Helsinki office of McCann-Erickson, an international advertising firm. "Since then I've lived in jeans
and lived on my drawings," is how he described the lifestyle transition which occurred during this period.
By the mid-1970 he was also emphasizing a photorealism
style making aspects of the drawings appear more photographic. Many of his drawings are based on photographs, but none are exact reproductions of them. The photographic inspiration is used, on the one hand, to create lifelike, almost moving images, with convincing and active postures and gestures while Laaksonen exaggerates physical features and presents his ideal of masculine beauty and sexual allure, combining realism with fantasy. In Daddy and the Muscle Academy - The Art, Life, and Times of Tom of Finland examples of photographs and the drawings based upon them are shown side by side.
In 1979, Laaksonen with businessman and friend Durk Dehner co-founded the Tom of Finland Company, which became the Tom of Finland Foundation
dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting homoerotic artwork. Although Laaksonen was quite successful at this point with his biography on the best-seller list and Benedikt Taschen
, the world's largest art book publisher had to reprint and expand a monograph of his works, he was most proud of the foundation. The scope of the organization expanded to erotic works of all types, sponsored contests, exhibits and started the groundwork for a museum of erotic art.
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.
The company produced a 1991 video biography, Daddy and the Muscle Academy: The Life and Art of Tom of Finland. By the late 1980s Laaksonen was well known in the gay world but his "pneumatically muscled, meticulously rendered monster-donged icons of masculinity" received mainstream attention when the film - which includes hundreds of images of his work along with interviews - was shown on Finnish national TV, won a Finnish Jussi Award in its category in 1992 and was shown at film festivals worldwide. While praising the artwork's quality one critic noted the film focussed on lauding Laaksonen as a gay pride icon
while ignoring "resemblance to both S & M
pornography and Fascist art" which she tied to Finland's early sexual experiences with German soldiers during World War II
.
, whose work depicting sado-masochism 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 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 caricature
s of the "hypersexual" black male, these traits are shared by Laaksonen's white characters as well.
Art critics have mixed views about Laaksonen's work. His 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 Meijer, owner of a leathershop and art gallery
in Amsterdam
, "These works are not conversation pieces, they're masturbation pieces."
Laaksonen's work revived and commercialized an underground leather counter-culture
which 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 demeanour adopted by large numbers of gay men during that period, such as Glenn Hughes
of The Village People and the Castro Clone look, appear to be derived directly from his work. 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.
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 by Sex Pistol
bassist Sid Vicious
, and became an iconic part of punk history in the process.
In the late 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
.
New York
's Museum of Modern Art
has acquired several examples of Laaksonen's artwork for its permanent collection.
In 2011 there is a large retrospective exhibition of Laaksonen's artwork in Turku
, Finland. The exhibition is one of the official events in Turku's European Capital of Culture
programme.
The Foundation's Mission Statement: "Tom of Finland Foundation (ToFF) is dedicated to protect, preserve, document and educate the public about erotic art and erotic artists. ToFF shall continue to encourage the work of erotic visual artists regardless of race, creed, religion, gender, sexual identity, medium of expression or any other censoring criteria."
The permanent collection of ToFF contains more than 2,000 original works by Tom of Finland, and another 1,500 by hundreds of other artists, and the archives, with well over 500,000 images, documents, and memorabilia, together comprise the world’s largest repository of erotic art. Located in a 1906 Craftsman residence, TOM House, the Foundation maintains a revolving exhibition of over 150 different works from the permanent collection. Collectors, students, researchers, and the general public visit the House by appointment. Within the House is the artist’s sleeping room and studio where he created much of his work during the final period of his career.
ToFF receives royalties from the sale of licensed reproductions of Laaksonen's work. In 2008, eight works from the Foundation's permanent collection were stolen during a European travelling exhibition, some being onsold. The Foundation later reported that the owners of the Keith Talent gallery in London, the exhibition's appointed UK representatives, had been arrested and charged for the crime. According to Tucker Neel of Artillery Magazine, "Because the two dealers had no priors and had lost all credibility in their profession, Clarkin’s 10 month, and Pittuck’s 14 month, prison sentences were suspended and they were ordered to each carry out 150 hours of community service, and pay £5,700 to the collector to whom they sold the drawings, as well as over £1,000 in legal fees."
TOM OF FINLAND® is a registered trademark of Tom of Finland Foundation, Inc.and protected under international copyright law, Geneva Convention, 1982. Tom of Finland® Foundation, Inc., Los Angeles, California USA.
Duration of Feature: 93 Minutes. Also features frames of Laaksonen's graphic art.
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Tom of Finland (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991) was a Finnish artist notable for his stylized androerotic and fetish art and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade.
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 large penis
Penis
The penis is a biological feature of male animals including both vertebrates and invertebrates...
es. Tight or partially removed clothing showed off these traits, with the penis often visible as a bulge in tight trousers or prominently displayed for the viewer. His drawings frequently feature two or more men either immediately preceding or during explicit sexual activity. Nearly all of his characters were versatile and obviously enjoyed the bottom as well as the top role in sexual intercourse
Sexual intercourse
Sexual intercourse, also known as copulation or coitus, commonly refers to the act in which a male's penis enters a female's vagina for the purposes of sexual pleasure or reproduction. The entities may be of opposite sexes, or they may be hermaphroditic, as is the case with snails...
.
Early life and education
Laaksonen was born and raised by a middle-class family in KaarinaKaarina
Kaarina is a small city and municipality of Finland.It is located in the Finland Proper region and is a neighbouring town of Turku, which is the capital of Finland Proper, therefore Kaarina is a part of the Greater Turku region. The municipality has a population of and covers an area of of...
, a city in southwestern Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
, near the city of Turku
Turku
Turku is a city situated on the southwest coast of Finland at the mouth of the Aura River. It is located in the region of Finland Proper. It is believed that Turku came into existence during the end of the 13th century which makes it the oldest city in Finland...
.
He studied in Turku and in 1939 he moved to the country's capital Helsinki
Helsinki
Helsinki is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the region of Uusimaa, located in southern Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is , making it by far the most populous municipality in Finland. Helsinki is...
to study advertising, he also started drawing erotic images for his own pleasure. He first kept his drawings hidden, but then destroyed them "at least by the time I went to serve the army". His drawings were based on images of masculine laborers he had seen from an early age. The country soon became embroiled in the Winter War
Winter War
The Winter War was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland. It began with a Soviet offensive on 30 November 1939 – three months after the start of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland – and ended on 13 March 1940 with the Moscow Peace Treaty...
with the USSR, and then formally involved in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. He was conscripted in February 1940 into the Finnish Army
Finnish Army
The Finnish Army is the land forces branch of the Finnish Defence Forces.Today's Army is divided into six branches: the infantry , field artillery, anti-aircraft artillery, engineers, signals, and materiel troops.-History of the Finnish Army:Between 1809 and 1917 Finland was an autonomous part of...
. He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of a second lieutenant. He later attributed his fetishistic interest in uniformed men to encounters with men in army uniform, especially soldiers of the German Wehrmacht serving in Finland at that time. After the war, in 1945, he returned to studies at the art college.
Laaksonen's artwork of this period compared to later works is considered more romantic and softer with "gentle-featured shapes and forms". The men featured were middle-class compared to the lower-class sailors, bikers, lumberjacks, construction workers, etc. of his later work. Another key difference is the lack of dramatic compositions, self-assertive poses, muscular bodies and "detached exotic settings" that his later work embodied.
Early career
In 1956 Laaksonen submitted drawings to the influential American magazine Physique Pictorial which premiered the images in the Spring 1957 issue under the pseudonym Tom, as it resembled his given name Touko; he was also featured as the cover artist with an illustration of two log driversLumberjack
A lumberjack is a worker in the logging industry who performs the initial harvesting and transport of trees for ultimate processing into forest products. The term usually refers to a bygone era when hand tools were used in harvesting trees principally from virgin forest...
at work. The editor of the magazine credited them to Tom of Finland. The cover image included a third workingman in the background watching the two log drivers. Pulled from Finnish mythology of lumberjacks representing strong masculinity, Laaksonen emphasized and privileged "homoerotic potentiality [...] relocating it in a gay context", a strategy repeated throughout his career.
Post World War II saw the rise of the biker culture as rejecting "the organization and normalization of life after the war, with its conformist, settled lifestyle." Biker subculture was both marginal and oppositional and provided postwar gay men with a stylized masculinity that included rebelliousness and danger which were absent from dominant gay stereotypes. In mainstream culture the strongest image of gay men was generally the effeminate sissy
Sissy
Sissy is a pejorative term for a boy or man who violates or does not meet the traditional male gender role. Generally, sissy implies a lack of the courage and stoicism which are thought important to the male role...
as seen in vaudeville and films going back to the first years of the industry. Laaksonen was influenced by images of bikers as well as artwork of George Quaintance
George Quaintance
George Quaintance was an American artist famous for his "idealized, strongly homoerotic" depictions of men in physique magazines...
and Etienne
Étienne
- Music :*"Étienne", a 1987 single by French artist Guesch Patti*"Etienne Trilogy", a song by the short-lived Tori Amos project Y Kant Tori Read on the album of the same name.- Persons :*Etienne , U.S...
, among others, that he cited as his precursors; they were "disseminated to gay readership through homoerotic physique magazines" starting in 1950. Laaksonen's drawings of bikers and leathermen
Leather subculture
The leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures...
capitalized on the leather and denim
Denim
Denim is a rugged cotton twill textile, in which the weft passes under two or more warp threads. This produces the familiar diagonal ribbing identifiable on the reverse of the fabric, which distinguishes denim from cotton duck. Denim has been in American usage since the late 18th century...
outfits which differentiated those men from mainstream culture and suggested they were untamed, physical, and self-empowered. This is contrasted with the mainstream, medical and psychological sad and sensitive young gay man who is passive. Laaksonen's drawings of this time "can be seen as consolidating an array of factors, styles and discourses already existing in the 1950s gay subcultures," this may have led to them being widely distributed and popularized in gay culture.
U.S. censorship codes (1950s-1960s)
Laaksonen's style and content in the late-1950s and early 1960s was partly influenced by the U.S. censorshipCensorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
codes that restricted depiction of "overt homosexual acts." His work was published in the beefcake
Beefcake magazines
Beefcake magazines were magazines published in North America in the 1930s to 1960s that featured photographs of attractive, muscular young men in athletic poses...
genre that began in the 1930s and predominantly featured photographs of attractive, muscular young men in athletic poses often shown demonstrating exercises. Their primary market was gay men, but because of the conservative and homophobic
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...
social culture of the era gay pornography
Gay pornography
Gay pornography is the representation of sexual intercourse between men with the primary goal of sexual arousal in its audience. There is also a tradition, and continuing considerable output, of lesbian pornography....
was illegal and the publications were typically presented as dedicated to physical fitness and health. They were often the only connection that closeted
Closeted
Closeted and in the closet are metaphors used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and intersex people who have not disclosed their sexual orientation or gender identity and aspects thereof, including sexual identity and sexual behavior.-Background:In late 20th...
men had to their sexuality. By this time however Laaksonen was rendering private commissions so more explicit work was produced but remained unpublished.
In the 1962 case of MANual Enterprises v. Day
MANual Enterprises v. Day
MANual Enterprises v. Day, 370 U.S. 478 is a decision by the United States Supreme Court which held that magazines consisting largely of photographs of nude or near-nude male models are not obscene within the meaning of...
the United States Supreme Court ruled that nude male photographs were not obscene. Softcore
Softcore
Softcore pornography is a form of filmic or photographic pornography or erotica that is less sexually explicit than hardcore pornography. It is intended to tickle and arouse men and women. Softcore pornography depicts nude and semi-nude performers engaging in casual social nudity or non-graphic...
gay pornography magazines and films featuring fully nude models, some of them tumescent
Tumescence
Tumescence is the quality or state of being tumescent or swollen. Tumescence usually refers to the normal engorgement with blood of the erectile tissues, marking sexual excitation and possible readiness for sexual activity...
, quickly appeared and the pretense of being about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the 1960s the market for beefcake magazines collapsed. Laaksonen was able to publish his more overtly homoerotic work and it changed the context with "new possibilities and conventions for displaying frontal male nudity in magazines and movies." Laaksonen reacted by publishing more explicit drawings and stylized his figures' fantastical aspects with exaggerated physical aspects, particularly their genitals and muscles.
He is best known for works that focused on homomasculine archetypes such as lumberjacks, motorcycle
Motorcycle
A motorcycle is a single-track, two-wheeled motor vehicle. Motorcycles vary considerably depending on the task for which they are designed, such as long distance travel, navigating congested urban traffic, cruising, sport and racing, or off-road conditions.Motorcycles are one of the most...
policemen, sailors, bikers, and leathermen. His most prominent comic series are the "Kake" comics, which included these archetypal characters in abundance.
Gay mainstream appeal (1970s)
Laaksonen's work had predominantly been segmented to private collectors and collections seen only by consumers who sought out the underground gay pornography industry. With the decriminalization of male nudity gay pornography became more mainstream in gay cultures. Laaksonen's drawings also came to the attention of mainstream gay communities, and by 1973, he was both publishing erotic comic bookComic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
s and making inroads to the mainstream art world with exhibitions. In 1973 he gave up his full-time job at the Helsinki office of McCann-Erickson, an international advertising firm. "Since then I've lived in jeans
Jeans
Jeans are trousers made from denim. Some of the earliest American blue jeans were made by Jacob Davis, Calvin Rogers, and Levi Strauss in 1873. Starting in the 1950s, jeans, originally designed for cowboys, became popular among teenagers. Historic brands include Levi's, Lee, and Wrangler...
and lived on my drawings," is how he described the lifestyle transition which occurred during this period.
By the mid-1970 he was also emphasizing a photorealism
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
style making aspects of the drawings appear more photographic. Many of his drawings are based on photographs, but none are exact reproductions of them. The photographic inspiration is used, on the one hand, to create lifelike, almost moving images, with convincing and active postures and gestures while Laaksonen exaggerates physical features and presents his ideal of masculine beauty and sexual allure, combining realism with fantasy. In Daddy and the Muscle Academy - The Art, Life, and Times of Tom of Finland examples of photographs and the drawings based upon them are shown side by side.
In 1979, Laaksonen with businessman and friend Durk Dehner co-founded the Tom of Finland Company, which became the Tom of Finland Foundation
Foundation (charity)
A foundation is a legal categorization of nonprofit organizations that will typically either donate funds and support to other organizations, or provide the source of funding for its own charitable purposes....
dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting homoerotic artwork. Although Laaksonen was quite successful at this point with his biography on the best-seller list and Benedikt Taschen
Benedikt Taschen
Benedikt Taschen, 1961, Cologne, Germany, is a German publisher. His professional life started at age 18 in a store in Cologne, Germany, named TASCHEN COMICS. In 1984, he bought 40,000 remainder copies of a Magritte monograph published in English with money borrowed from his family. The books sold...
, the world's largest art book publisher had to reprint and expand a monograph of his works, he was most proud of the foundation. The scope of the organization expanded to erotic works of all types, sponsored contests, exhibits and started the groundwork for a museum of erotic art.
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
Homoeroticism
Homoeroticism refers to the erotic attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female , most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements...
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.
The company produced a 1991 video biography, Daddy and the Muscle Academy: The Life and Art of Tom of Finland. By the late 1980s Laaksonen was well known in the gay world but his "pneumatically muscled, meticulously rendered monster-donged icons of masculinity" received mainstream attention when the film - which includes hundreds of images of his work along with interviews - was shown on Finnish national TV, won a Finnish Jussi Award in its category in 1992 and was shown at film festivals worldwide. While praising the artwork's quality one critic noted the film focussed on lauding Laaksonen as a gay pride icon
Gay icon
A gay icon is a public figure who is embraced by many within :lesbian, :gay, :bisexual and :transgender communities...
while ignoring "resemblance to both S & M
BDSM
BDSM is an erotic preference and a form of sexual expression involving the consensual use of restraint, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role-play. The compound acronym BDSM is derived from the terms bondage and discipline , dominance and submission , and sadism and masochism...
pornography and Fascist art" which she tied to Finland's early sexual experiences with German soldiers during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Reception
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 MapplethorpeRobert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...
, whose work depicting sado-masochism and fetish
Sexual fetishism
Sexual fetishism, or erotic fetishism, is the sexual arousal a person receives from a physical object, or from a specific situation. The object or situation of interest is called the fetish, the person a fetishist who has a fetish for that object/situation. Sexual fetishism may be regarded, e.g...
iconography
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
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 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 caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...
s of the "hypersexual" black male, these traits are shared by Laaksonen's white characters as well.
Art critics have mixed views about Laaksonen's work. His detailed drawing technique has led to him being described as a 'master with a pencil', while in contrast a reviewer for Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
newspaper Het Parool
Het Parool
Het Parool is an Amsterdam-based daily newspaper. It was founded as a resistance paper during World War II by Frans Van Heuven Goedhart and Jaap Nunes Vaz...
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 Meijer, owner of a leathershop and art gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
, "These works are not conversation pieces, they're masturbation pieces."
Cultural impact and legacy
Leather subculture
The leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures...
which emerged after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and reached its height in the late 1970s and early 1980s before the emergence of AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
in the gay community
Gay community
The gay community, or LGBT community, is a loosely defined grouping of LGBT and LGBT-supportive people, organizations and subcultures, united by a common culture and civil rights movements. These communities generally celebrate pride, diversity, individuality, and sexuality...
.
The apparel, styling, and demeanour adopted by large numbers of gay men during that period, such as Glenn Hughes
Glenn Hughes (singer)
Glenn M. Hughes was the original "Biker" character in the disco group Village People from 1977 to 1996. He graduated Class of 1968 from Chaminade High School, then attending Manhattan College, where he was initiated as a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity in 1969...
of The Village People and the Castro Clone look, appear to be derived directly from his work. 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.
In the late 1970s, clothes designer Vivienne Westwood
Vivienne Westwood
Dame Vivienne Westwood, DBE, RDI is a British fashion designer and businesswoman, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream.-Early life:...
appropriated Laaksonen's art for t-shirts which were featured at SEX
SEX (boutique)
SEX was a boutique run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at 430 King's Road, London between 1974 and 1976. It specialized in clothing that defined the look of the punk movement.-History:...
, the store run by Westwood and partner Malcolm McLaren
Malcolm McLaren
Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren was an English performer, impresario, self-publicist and manager of the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls...
. The t-shirts were modeled by Sex Pistol
Sex Pistols
The Sex Pistols were an English punk rock band that formed in London in 1975. They were responsible for initiating the punk movement in the United Kingdom and inspiring many later punk and alternative rock musicians...
bassist Sid Vicious
Sid Vicious
Sid Vicious was an English musician best known as the bassist of the influential punk rock group Sex Pistols...
, and became an iconic part of punk history in the process.
In the late 1980s, artist G. B. Jones
G. B. Jones
G. B. Jones is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, musician, and publisher of zines based in Toronto, Canada. Her drawings have been featured at galleries around the world, and her films screened at numerous film festivals, both in Canada and abroad...
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
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in the early 1990s.
In 1999, an exhibition took place at the Institut Culturel Finlandais (Finnish Cultural Centre) in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
's Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
has acquired several examples of Laaksonen's artwork for its permanent collection.
In 2011 there is a large retrospective exhibition of Laaksonen's artwork in Turku
Turku
Turku is a city situated on the southwest coast of Finland at the mouth of the Aura River. It is located in the region of Finland Proper. It is believed that Turku came into existence during the end of the 13th century which makes it the oldest city in Finland...
, Finland. The exhibition is one of the official events in Turku's European Capital of Culture
European Capital of Culture
The European Capital of Culture is a city designated by theEuropean Union for a period of one calendar year during which it organises a series of cultural events with a strong European dimension....
programme.
Tom of Finland Foundation
In 1984, the nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational archive, Tom of Finland Foundation (ToFF) was established by the artist Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920 – 1991) and Durk Dehner. As Tom had established worldwide recognition as the master of homoerotic art, the Foundation's original purpose was to preserve his vast catalog of work. Several years later the scope was widened to offer a safe haven for all erotic art in response to rampant discrimination against art that portrayed sexual behavior or generated a sexual response. ToFF continues in its efforts of educating the public as to the cultural merits of erotic art and in promoting healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality.The Foundation's Mission Statement: "Tom of Finland Foundation (ToFF) is dedicated to protect, preserve, document and educate the public about erotic art and erotic artists. ToFF shall continue to encourage the work of erotic visual artists regardless of race, creed, religion, gender, sexual identity, medium of expression or any other censoring criteria."
The permanent collection of ToFF contains more than 2,000 original works by Tom of Finland, and another 1,500 by hundreds of other artists, and the archives, with well over 500,000 images, documents, and memorabilia, together comprise the world’s largest repository of erotic art. Located in a 1906 Craftsman residence, TOM House, the Foundation maintains a revolving exhibition of over 150 different works from the permanent collection. Collectors, students, researchers, and the general public visit the House by appointment. Within the House is the artist’s sleeping room and studio where he created much of his work during the final period of his career.
ToFF receives royalties from the sale of licensed reproductions of Laaksonen's work. In 2008, eight works from the Foundation's permanent collection were stolen during a European travelling exhibition, some being onsold. The Foundation later reported that the owners of the Keith Talent gallery in London, the exhibition's appointed UK representatives, had been arrested and charged for the crime. According to Tucker Neel of Artillery Magazine, "Because the two dealers had no priors and had lost all credibility in their profession, Clarkin’s 10 month, and Pittuck’s 14 month, prison sentences were suspended and they were ordered to each carry out 150 hours of community service, and pay £5,700 to the collector to whom they sold the drawings, as well as over £1,000 in legal fees."
TOM OF FINLAND® is a registered trademark of Tom of Finland Foundation, Inc.and protected under international copyright law, Geneva Convention, 1982. Tom of Finland® Foundation, Inc., Los Angeles, California USA.
Fragrance
Etat Libre d’Orange has created, in partnership with Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, an eau de parfum with a selection of Tom’s most famous iconic drawings hidden inside the packaging.Videography
- Ilppo Pohjola (author): Kari Paljakka 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.