Born Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), Tom revolutionized not just the depiction of gay men with his highly stylized and hypersexualized imagery but also the way they were perceived in society and how they perceived themselves. As he created his work at a time when it was illegal to do so, much of Tom's earlier work could land both the artist and collector in jail on indecency and pornography charges. As a result, recognition of his artistry spread organically via word of mouth and outside the museums and galleries of the established art world. Prono, Luca: Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture. p. 258. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008. ISBN 978-0-313-33599-0 Hooven, F. Valentine III (2012). Tom of Finland: Life and Work of a Gay Hero. Berlin: Bruno Gmünder Verlag. ISBN 978-3-86787-166-2. Not all the illustrations in the sketchbook are preparatory works, what Laaksonen called ‘roughs,’ where he’s arranging figures and compositions. Karstens isn’t surprised so many mainstream retailers have been clamoring to collaborate with the Tom of Finland Foundation.

Ramakers, Mischa. Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity and Homosexuality. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. ISBN 0-312-20526-0 Karstens and Juden worked closely with the Tom of Finland Foundation to pull highlights from a more extensive collection of Laaksonen’s sketches, some of which appeared in public for the first time in a 2017 exhibition. In 2015, Artists Space presented the exhibition "Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play" in New York City, USA. [38] The exhibition was also presented in Kunsthalle Helsinki in 2016, complemented with additional material such as photos from family albums. [39] Löfström, Jan (1998), "Scandinavian homosexualities: essays on gay and lesbian studies", Journal of homosexuality, Routledge, vol.35, no.3–4, pp.189–206, ISBN 0-7890-0508-5In 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." [ citation needed]

This biography follows the creator behind the Kake comics, showing his creative and personal development. And for those of us who read and study the sexuality of queer men this book is an important document in understanding the history of how gay, and bi, men practiced their sexuality. Millstein, Seth (15 April 2014). "Finland's Homoerotic Postage Stamps Are Pretty Bold". Bustle . Retrieved 19 August 2015. 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 1981Ilppo 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.) Tom of Finland to appear on stamps in September". Itella Posti. 13 April 2014. Archived from the original on 15 April 2014 . Retrieved 17 April 2014.

Excellent biography about the man who became Tom of Finland. I have another book that's about him, but it doesn't go into the kind of detail about his life that this one does. Even as a lesbian, I can appreciate the talent he had. He was best at drawing portraits of actual people - there was one drawing he did of a model on a motorcycle that was so good, I almost couldn't tell it was a drawing and not a photograph. It showed the drawing and the photograph side by side, and there was almost no difference. I don't really care for his general drawings of men with hugely muscled oversized bodies, small heads, kind of flat faces with stub noses, and unrealistically huge penises; to me, those are kind of ridiculous, although his attention to detail is incredible. And the few women he drew were just embarrassing. He admitted he couldn't draw women and didn't like doing it, which was plainly obvious. At best, his women looked like men dressed as women, or transgenders. a b c d e Beefcake (1999); Thom Fitzgerald, writer, director, co-producer; Shandi Mitchell, co-producer; Alliance Independent Films. In her drawings for TOM, Prada wanted to pay homage to the difficulties of being a gay man at the height of Finland’s fame in the mid-20th century, but also approach it with her own femininity. “All the gay culture we can never forget,” she says. “We need to be more aware of that time when the struggle of being a gay man was part of the art. I think the female perspective comes through in a way that’s more emotional and erotic than sexual. It’s also a little bit chic.”Playboy bunnies, pinup girls — they’ve been the norm for ages. It was time for it to happen to men,” he said. “There’s been a window opened to acceptance of male nudes, of homoerotic art. It’s a catching up — an emancipation of the male body.” In May, Diesel partnered with Tom of Finland on a Pride capsule collection and launched “All Together,” a pair of exhibitions in Venice and Paris displaying original works by Tom of Finland and artists inspired by him. Waugh, Thomas: Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-231-09998-3. Tom of Finland: The Comic Collection. Vol. 1–5. Dian Hanson, ed. London: Taschen, 2005. ISBN 978-3-8228-3849-5 Laaksonen was born on 8 May 1920 and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a town in southwestern Finland, near the city of Turku. [3] Both of his parents Suoma and Edwin Laaksonen were schoolteachers at the grammar school that served Kaarina. The family lived in the school building's attached living quarters. [4]

Touko Valio Laaksonen, the queer Finnish artist better known as Tom of Finland, died in 1991. But his iconic homoerotic drawings are as popular now as in the 1950s and ‘60s — if not more so. In 2013, MOCA presented Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland in Los Angeles, USA. The artist's work was also seen in HAPPY BIRTHDAY Galerie Perrotin – 25 years in Lille, France; Leslie Lohman Museum's Rare and Raw in New York City, USA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art's Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper) in London, England.

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] We wanted to show a spectrum of what he drew and how he drew,” Karstens said. “Not just ones where every line is perfect. But drawings where you see the process and a bit of how ‘Tom’s man’ changed.” Tom of Finland sketches, left 1970, right 1973. Sketches provided by Tom of Finland Foundation, Inc. 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. [ citation needed] Prada, on the other hand, is known for her pop-art sketches of celebrities. She says she became “obsessed” with Finland after reading about him in one of Andy Warhol’s editions of Interview magazine. Like Finland, she works a lot in pencil and draws photo-realistic images of icons, which is one reason why the Tom of Finland Foundation reached out to Prada to make the new book.