Tom of Finland, un pioniere di liberazione omoerotica: la mostra a Venezia

From the first drawings of the 1950s to the acclamation at the MoMA in New York, the celebration of an artist who changed the gay imagination forever.

From 23rd April until 26th June, a group exhibition entitled AllTogheter in collaboration with DIESEL will be held in Venice at Studio Cannaregio, to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Tom of Finland. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Tom Of Finland Foundation which for more than forty years has preserved the works of countless queer artists, and is curated by The Community, a multidisciplinary art institution that since 2021 together with The Community Center, offers platforms support for emerging artists around the world.

But who was Tom of Finland really? And why is it essential to know him even today?

TOM OF FINLAND Untitled, 1980

At the registry office, Touko Valio Laaksonen was born in 1920 near Turku, a rural town in southwestern Finland. He is trained at a communications agency, but no one can take the pencil out of his hands. Since he was a boy, he spends his days drawing giant men: peasants, policemen, workers, sailors, convicts. Professions that no one at the time would have associated with the gay world, but which gave full freedom to Touko’s most hidden fantasies, free from prying eyes or censorship.

In 1956, when he starts collaborating with Physique Pictorial magazine, Touko becomes Tom of Finland, replacing his surname with the country of birth as a Renaissance artist. It is a historical period in which eroticism and homosexuality are not considered on the agenda, but Tom manages to throw off any suspicion, proposing the magazine as a periodical dedicated to the body and well-being of the male.

TOM OF FINLAND Untitled, 1977

In the seventies Tom sets up on his own and gives vent to his impulses, which become a distinctive feature of an aesthetic that will make history: the models become the apotheosis of testosterone, alpha males with extreme forms, hypersexualized without fear of disturbing or shaking the modesty of the time.

Tom of Finland has never presented himself as a raised eyebrow artist, on the contrary, his works have always made the fine line between art and pornography imperceptible, with the primary aim of tickling his desires and those of the beholder: “If I didn’t get aroused, I wouldn’t even take a pencil in my hand,” he declared bluntly.

In the words of the art historian Micha Ramakers, his drawings were born from a riot of inspirations, from the Renaissance to the Baroque Art, from Paul Cadmus to the forbidden fantasies of when he was a child. In 1976 two fans organized the first Tom of Finland exhibition in Europe, at the Revelt Shop, a sex shop in Hamburg. The exhibition – titled “The Loggers” – is a point of no return: his works reach the MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the MOCA in Los Angeles, and the name of Tom of Finland ends up on everyone’s lips.

TOM OF FINLAND, Portrait of Pekka (Cover of Sex in the Shed), 1975

If for the contemporary sensitivity of the LGBTQIA+ community the masculinity represented by Tom today would be excessive and, in some ways, caricatured – from the big mustache to the overflowing penises in his pants – in the 1950s, during a historical period in which gay men were constantly referred to as “missing women”, Tom rewrote the male imagination of the time:

“The hyper-virile macho is no longer universally heterosexual, but on the contrary has sex with other men and becomes a symbol of that much derided and shattered homosexual world, finally represented in an insolent guise, self-aware, and devoid of any censorship, moral or expressive.”

“The art of Tom of Finland has the power to change people’s lives and make them feel important,” said Elysia Borowy-Reeder, executive director of MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit): “It’s something that has a great political message, today in particular.“

The exhibition, which opens in Venice in the days of the great opening of the Biennale Arte 2022, was strongly desired by the creative director of Diesel,  Glenn Martens, born in 1983: proof of the great visual impact that the imagery of Tom of Finland has left. even on the younger generation of creatives.

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Published: 4th May 2022

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