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Kake (comics) - Wikipedia

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.

100 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. In 1999, an exhibition took place at the Institut Culturel Finlandais ( Finnish Cultural Centre) in Paris.

Tom of Finland - Wikipedia Tom of Finland - Wikipedia

Tom of Finland, what he modeled for us in his drawings, was actually a butch drag. We ended up adopting this — it was a way for us to do drag as a community. But G. B. Jones, with her drawings, all of a sudden made it part of our queer culture — we could think of ourselves as being women and leather dykes versus just doing drag. Simon Haas, of the Los Angeles-based artist duo the Haas Brothers

Arell, Berndt; Mustola, Kati (2006). Tom of Finland: Ennennäkemätöntä – Unforeseen. Like. ISBN 952-471-843-X.

Books by Tom of Finland (Author of The Complete Kake Comics)

a b c Hooven, F. Valentine, III: Gay histories and cultures: an encyclopedia. Volume 2 of Encyclopedia of lesbian and gay histories and cultures. p. 884. George E. Haggerty, editor. Taylor & Francis, 2000. ISBN 0-8153-3354-4 a b c Ilppo Pohjola (author): Kari Paljakka and Alvaro Pardo (producers): Daddy and the Muscle Academy: Tom of Finland: United Kingdom: Oracle Home Entertainment: 2002. Tom of Finland TOM House: The Work and Life of Tom of Finland Mike Kelley's Mobile Homestead, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)Over the course offive decades, Tom’s work reflected societal changes as they appeared in fashion,technology, architecture, and commercial design (he began his career as an advertising illustrator).Because of the concentrated and consistent nature of his project, the peripheral variations that creep in become telling indicators of the ways in which the world was changing over the decades. For all of his many influential qualities, Tom was above all responsive: to his own desires, to the relationships and bodies he observed, and to his materials. Tom of Finland’s Untitled (Preparatory Drawing for Kake Vol. 16 — “Sex on the Train”) (1974). Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Let’s Go Camping with Tom of Finland is presented by The Lakes International Comic Art Festival and Cross Lane Projects in association with Tom of Finland Foundation. We kind of take Tom of Finland for granted, because, let’s be honest, as gay men, do we really need any more images of super muscular white dudes? No, of course not. But, also, he was an excellent portraitist, probably the last of the greatest of them, in a world where the camera has become omni-accessible. 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.