Billabonic

Life Among The Selected Few
2010-10-28 21:56:59 (UTC)

Tom of Finland

Touko Laaksonen
a.k.a. Tom of Finland


Birth name Touko Laaksonen
Born 8 May 1920
Kaarina, Finland
Died November 7, 1991 (aged 71)
Nationality Finland

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
penises. 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.



Biography
Early life and education
Laaksonen was born and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a
city in southwestern Finland, near Turku, one of the largest cities
of the country.

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.

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 drivers 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.

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. censorship 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.

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 books
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.


Cover of the Daddy and the Muscle Academy: The Life and Art of Tom
of Finland biographyThe 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.

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 Mapplethorpe, 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 caricatures 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."

Cultural impact and legacy

Tom of Finland memorial room with his personal belongings at the
Foundation's house, Los Angeles 2002; photographed by Henning von
BergLaaksonen'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.[citation needed] 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




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