Dehner, along with his partner S.R. Sharp, spoke with BuzzFeed News, about Tom's long legacy and the current exhibition of his photographs and reference material that is on view at Fotografiska in New York. For a long time, there was no language around transness, or folks that were gender nonconforming or nonbinary. And I think, similarly, perhaps when Tom of Finland was forging this iconic style, he really took ownership over his definition of what it was to be a homosexual, which was perhaps, at that time, a term that was viewed as weak or derogatory. For him to manifest this totally fantastical, empowered erotic vision, it was completely contrary to that. So, I think that aspect of his imagining is something that has definitely influenced me as an artist, in terms of me being able to understand and forge a possibility for myself. John Waters , Baltimore-based filmmaker

Writing for Artforum, Kevin Killian said that seeing Tom of Finland originals "produces a strong respect for his nimble, witty creation". [30] Kate Wolf writes that "Tom of Finland helped pave the way to gay liberation". [31] Cultural impact and legacy [ edit ]

Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works

The final Kake comic, Oversexed Office, was published in 1986; [12] after being diagnosed with emphysema in 1988, Laaksonen developed a tremble in his hands that restricted his ability to draw, and he died in 1991. [18] The series has been anthologized several times, notably by the art book publishing house Taschen, which published all issues of the series as The Complete Kake Comics in 2008. [19] The majority of the original artwork for Kake has been recovered by the Tom of Finland Foundation, and is preserved in the organization's archive. [12] List of issues [ edit ]

Ilppo Pohjola (author): Kari Paljakka and Alvaro Pardo (producers): Daddy and the Muscle Academy: Tom of Finland. Filmitakomo & YLE, Finland 1991. (Duration of Feature: 58 Minutes. Also features frames of Laaksonen's graphic art.) Disco Dining Club invites me in with open arms to a familiar kind of weird I’m ready to lose myself in.”– Playboy Tom of Finland: The Comic Collection. Vol. 1–5. Dian Hanson, ed. London: Taschen, 2005. ISBN 978-3-8228-3849-5 New York's Museum of Modern Art has acquired several examples of Laaksonen's artwork for its permanent collection. [35] In 2006, MoMA in New York accepted five Tom of Finland drawings as part of a much larger gift from The Judith Rothschild Foundation. The trustee of The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, said, "Tom of Finland is one of the five most influential artists of the twentieth century. As an artist he was superb, as an influence he was transcendent." [36] Hudson, of Feature Inc., New York, placed Tom of Finland's work in the collections of Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chicago. His work is also in the public Collections of: The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, USA; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art; Turku, Finland; University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (California), USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA; and Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles, USA. Throughout this timeline, Tom of Finland has remained a quintessential artist’s artist. In the early 1960s, the pioneering, boundary-pushing gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe, according to Patti Smith, discovered Tom of Finland’s work in a used bookstall in Times Square. Mapplethorpe would become a crucial link in exposing Laaksonen’s work to the contemporary art world. Mapplethorpe attended Laaksonen’s debut San Francisco exhibition at the pioneering queer art gallery Fey-Way Studios. Dehner facilitated the show, and Mapplethorpe’s enthusiasm helped the artist land an exhibition at Robert Samuel Gallery in New York two years later.Hooven, F. Valentine (1993). Tom of Finland: His Life and Times. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-09325-X. Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. [2] Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing. He went to school in Turku and in 1939, at the age of 19, he moved to Helsinki to study advertising. In his spare time he also started drawing erotic images for his own pleasure, [3] based on images of male laborers he had seen from an early age. At first he kept these drawings hidden, but then destroyed them "at least by the time I went to serve the army." [5] The country became embroiled in the Winter War with the Soviet Union, and then became formally involved in World War II, and he was conscripted in February 1940 into the Finnish Army. [3] He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of second lieutenant. [6] 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. "In my drawings I have no political statements to make, no ideology. I am thinking only about the picture itself. The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway—they had the sexiest uniforms!" [7] After the war, in 1945, he returned to studies. [3] In 2011 there was a large retrospective exhibition of Laaksonen's artwork in Turku, Finland. The exhibition was one of the official events in Turku's European Capital of Culture programme. [37]

Arell & Mustola, p. 31. This followed the naming conventions of the magazine. Other pseudonyms of the time were Bruce of Los Angeles and Spartan of Hollywood, for example. Then Tom would have to make the prints, and they had to be within that 4x6 size, because they couldn't be bigger than an airplane envelope. It was an enormously tedious process, but it was always in his mindset to try to get his work out there. It has the heart of an after-hours club but revels in the gilded decadence most below-radar nightlife is out to destroy”– LA Times Nipa ja Touko Dortmundissa" (in Finnish). Finnish Postal Museum [ fi]. Archived from the original on 30 June 2016 . Retrieved 27 January 2023. Mäkinen menehtyi kurkunpääsyöpään heinäkuussa 1981Miller, Jason (26 March 2013). "3 Questions with Wes Hurley |". Central-cinema.com. Archived from the original on 20 December 2016 . Retrieved 10 December 2016.