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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 . 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 saved 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 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 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 disawoved 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 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'. CULTURAL IMPACT AND LEGACY Arguably Laaksonen's work revived and commercialised an underground Leather Counter-culture which emerged after WWII and reached its height is 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 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. |
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