Tom of Finland. The Complete Kake Comics

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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.

To learn more about Tom of Finland, please view this lecturehe delivered at CalArts in 1985 (at the invitation of Mike Kelley), as well as these articles from Artforum.com, Art in America, DazedDigital.com, Drummer, The Guardian, and Vice.com. Durk Dehner: He said that his favorite part was that if you knew a model, it really made the difference for him. He was able to capture their spirit in a way and be able to embed that into the drawing. Tom of Finland: The Comic Collection. Vol. 1–5. Dian Hanson, ed. London: Taschen, 2005. ISBN 978-3-8228-3849-5 Millainen mies löytyy Tom of Finland -kuvien takaa? Touko Laaksosen sisarenpoika avasi kotialbumit HS:lle". Helsingin Sanomat (in Finnish). 5 May 2016 . Retrieved 19 October 2021.Arell, Berndt; Mustola, Kati (2006). Tom of Finland: Ennennäkemätöntä – Unforeseen. Like. ISBN 952-471-843-X. 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." [ citation needed] 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 ] 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 ] The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts, Claude J. Summers, Cleis Press, 2004. ISBN 1-57344-191-0

Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure. Mischa Ramakers, ed. London: Taschen, 1998, ISBN 3-8228-8598-3 In 1999, an exhibition took place at the Institut Culturel Finlandais ( Finnish Cultural Centre) in Paris. Sharp: We did a show here in Los Angeles at Western Project and a guy came up to me with a little Ziploc bag, and he said, This is a picture that Bob Mizer took of me in 1955. I worked for the LA School District. If anyone had seen this, I would have been fired. It was very underground because it had to be underground. We only survived by navigating secret spaces and having friends whisper and give us phone numbers. 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]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. Bob Mizer and Tom of Finland", Kate Wolf, Artforum International Magazine (Online), 21 November 2013 An initially secretive postwar art practice begun while the artist was working a day job at an advertising agency developed into a career, spurred on by a successful submission, in 1956, to Mizer’s magazine, Physique Pictorial, which had to be branded as a fitness magazine as a cover, though that didn’t always work (Mizer was charged with obscenity in 1954). Early pieces published under the Tom of Finland moniker were more suggestive than explicit, but the artist’s work evolved with the loosening of both legal and social constraints. Even so, many of Laaksonen’s later, more explicit drawings retained the winking affability seen in his more formative work. 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.

Laaksonen was diagnosed with emphysema in 1988. Eventually the disease and medication caused his hands to tremble, leading him to switch media from pencil to pastel. He died in 1991 of an emphysema-induced stroke. [6] Private life [ edit ] Suomen sarjakuvaseura ry - 1990: Touko Laaksonen - Tom of Finland". The Finnish Comics Society (in Finnish) . Retrieved 19 January 2019.Can you talk a little bit about the Tom of Finland Foundation and how that's working now to like promote his legacy? When we curated the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, we installed a whole wall with Tom of Finland drawings. Even at that time his art was considered controversial. It’s funny to think that only a few years later Tom of Finland’s drawings appeared on national stamps and on bedsheets and cushion covers from the traditional Finnish textile company Finlayson, founded in 1820. Cassils, Los Angeles-based performance artist 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. S.R. Sharp, who is the vice-president and curator at the Tom of Finland Foundation, says artists like Kelley revered Tom because his art did nothing less than offer permission to explore sexuality and explicit imagery in their own work. “And they always have remembered that,” Sharp says. “And they’ve carried his legacy for many, many, many years.”

Laaksonen's illustrations of leathermen, as exemplified by Kake, significantly influenced the aesthetics of the gay leather subculture. Kake is among Laaksonen's most popular creations, having been alternately described as his "most iconic character" and as "the gay world's most familiar pin-up icon". 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.) 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's drawings were not merely products of his imagination; part of their appeal lay in their intimate expressions, which were drawn from reference photos that Tom took of hundreds of men over the years.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. 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] 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.