Tom of Finland Receives Largest Ever Museum Show

Leevi Haapala, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, discusses the artist's icon status and the challenges of presenting his work at a public institution.

Touko Valio Laaksonen (1920–1991), better known as Tom of Finland, built a cult following with what he liked to call his 'dirty drawings'.

His illustrations of muscular men in circulation-strangling clothing found an audience in the gay community of the '50s and '60s, and went on to influence figures such as Freddie Mercury, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Filmmaker John Waters and critic Camille Paglia both contributed to Taschen's 666-page coffee table book Tom of Finland : XXL (2016).

Tom's place in art history will be further cemented by the exhibition Tom of Finland at the Finnish National Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, from 28 April to 29 October.

This major overview of the artist's work will include not just drawings but vitrines filled with personal effects and memorabilia and a VR experience of his home in Los Angeles, now the headquarters of the Tom of Finland Foundation.

A concurrent exhibition at the museum, titled Dreamy, will showcase works by other queer artists including Nan Goldin, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lynda Benglis, and Artor Jesus Inkerö.

We spoke to museum director Leevi Haapala about the upcoming show.

What most interests you about the work of Tom of Finland?

What's most interesting for us is how Tom constructed a new iconography of gay masculinity that spread around the world, exerting a widespread influence in many fields of art and culture.

For the majority of his career, homosexuality in Finland was met with prejudice: it was penalised by law until 1971 and considered an illness until 1981. In this context, Tom's drawings were a brave, proud and defiant stance, portraying joyful men engaged in erotic and sexual pleasure.

This has made him a key figure in the history of non-normative identities in Finland, the Nordic countries and the West at large. But it was not until the early 1990s that he gained recognition, both in Finland and elsewhere, explicitly as an artist rather than just a pornographic illustrator. Over the years, images of private pleasure and desire have become common currency.

The very name Tom of Finland implies he is a figure the Finnish people might have a vested interest in, as if he were an ambassador for the country. How is he perceived by different communities in Finland?

Bob Mizer, the publisher of [American beefcake magazine] Physique Pictorial where Tom of Finland's drawings first appeared in public in 1957, was responsible for adding 'of Finland' to the original signature. Today, Tom of Finland is a cultural icon in his home country and one of the most recognised national figures. Different communities still feel strong ownership of Tom's art and his legacy—fetish fans and (gay) artists at large, but also wider audiences who love his drawings and how they continue to be interpreted by contemporary artists in design, fashion, and visual arts.

If comedy is tragedy plus time, does erotica plus time equal art? It may lose sexual potency compared to what follows, but yield important insights into the socio-political conditions in which it was produced.

That's an interesting and complex question; it's difficult to use hindsight and not have a reference to gauge this through lived experience. What we find significant to underline is how a body of work originally conceived and distributed by a fairly small group became so influential not just in non-normative communities but also to society in large, having influenced popular mainstream culture in such a visible way.

What are the challenges of presenting erotic work at the Finnish National Gallery?

Our aim is to celebrate Tom of Finland as a Finnish artist whom we and our audiences should be proud of. By exhibiting his works in our largest gallery space, we want to do justice to Tom's incredible career and give his work the visibility it deserves. Identity and sexuality are relevant topics for contemporary artists and audiences, and familiar to our visitors from other elements of our programme.

The challenge which I've touched on (and which this exhibition aims to resolve) has been to find a balance that contextualises Tom of Finland's development as an artist and the difficult times he witnessed, alongside the obvious sexual content of the work. A museum show is an ideal opportunity to tell these stories and add to the experience via interpretive texts and materials like artist interviews and archive footage, so our visitors can hear his story, in his own words.

Given the nature of some of the works, the exhibition comes with guidance that it is not recommended for children, and it will include an 'adults only' section where people can choose whether to enter that section or not. Our hope is that the homecoming of Finland's most famous artist is as accessible and illuminating as possible for all those who come to see it. —[O]