Tom of Finland
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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.
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[edit] Life and career
At 19, Laaksonen moved from his native Kaarina to Helsinki to attend art school. It was here where he first 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 Touko 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 American magazine Physique Pictorial for publication under the pseudonym of "Tom of Finland" to avoid scrutiny in his home country. Allegedly, Laaksonen chose "Tom" as it resembles his birthname Touko more than any other English name.
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. "Tom" 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 is 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 transition in his lifestyle 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 the works of "Tom", 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, "Tom" 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.
[edit] Controversy and artistic appreciation
During his lifetime and beyond Laaksonen's work drew admiration and disdain from different quarters of the artistic community. Laaksonen developed a friendship with gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe whose work depicting sado-masochism and fetish iconography was also subject to controversy.
A controversial area of work were drawings eroticising men dressed in Nazi uniforms. Forming a small part of his overall work, from an early stage, their sensitivity has led them to be omitted from most recent anthologies of his work. Laaksonen later disavowed this work and was at pains to dissociate himself and his work from fascist or racist ideologies. Tom also depicted a large number of black men in his drawings, and there is no suggestion of any racial or political message in the context in which they appear.
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.
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 leathershop and art gallery in Amsterdam, 'These works are not conversation pieces, they're masturbation pieces'.
[edit] Cultural impact and legacy
Arguably Laaksonen's work revived and commercialised 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 appear to be derived directly from his work (for example, Glenn Hughes from 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 cap-leather-jacket-moustache combination became known in the pop culture of Western world as a visual stereotype of gay men (see Police Academy movie series).
In the late 1970's, clothes designer Vivienne Westwood appropriated Tom's art work for t-shirts which were featured at SEX, the store run by Westwood and partner Malcolm McLaren. The t-shirts were modelled for photographs by Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, becoming an iconic part of punk history in the process.
In 1999, an exhibition took place at the Institut Culturel Finlandais (Finnish Cultural Centre) in Paris. In 2004, New York's Museum of Modern Art inducted several examples of Tom's artwork into its permanent collection.
[edit] Bibliography
- F.Valentine Hooven: Tom of Finland: His Life and Times: New York: St Martins Press: 1993: ISBN 031209325X
- Dian Hanson (ed) Tom of Finland: The Comic Collection (Five Volumes): Koln: London: Taschen: 2005: ISBN 3822383497
- Mischa Ramakers: Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity and Homosexuality: New York: Saint Martins Press: 2001: ISBN 031227694
- Mischa Ramakers (ed) Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure: Koln: London: Taschen: 1998: ISBN 3822885983
[edit] Videography
- Ilppo Pohjola (author): Kari Paljakha and Alvaro Pardo (producers): Daddy and the Muscle Academy: Tom of Finland: United Kingdon: 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.
