The Ends of Art History in Finland (pt 4 of 4)
Finally getting to the bottom of things at the top of the world
Oh Lydia, oh, Lydia, say have you met Lydia
Oh, Lydia, the tattooed lady
She has eyes that folks adore so
And a torso even more so
Lydia, oh, Lydia, that encyclopedia
Oh, Lydia, the queen of them all
On her back is the Battle of Waterloo
Beside it the Wreck of the Hesperus too
And proudly above the waves
The Red, White and Blue
You can learn a lot from Lydia
What: A drawing from the series “Tattooed Sailor and the Hoods” by printed in Physique Pictorial Vol 12 No 1 by Tom of Finland (Touko Valio Laaksonen).
Touko Valio Laaksonen had a very typical middle-Finnish childhood. He was born outside of Turku, Finland’s oldest city, the historic capital, and the Official Christmas City of Finland1. His parents were school teachers, and he excelled at drawing and apparently not much else. He moved to Finland to train as an advertising artist, but spent most of his time and energy drawing vaguely pornographic sketches of buff, large men in various stages of undress. When the Winter War broke out, Touko was called to the army, becoming the leader of an anti-aircraft crew. The Soviets would bomb Helsinki repeatedly during the Winter War and Continuation War. The unprovoked bombing of Helsinki at the start of the Winter War was devastating, over 100 civilians died and hundreds more were injured. The bombing campaign was not, however, particularly well thought out — the Soviets accidentally bombed their own embassy.
Reading contemporaneous accounts of Helsinki in World War II, it is easy to understand why Laaksonen, as an anti-aircraft specialist, would find the Winter War to be an important turning point of his life. But it wasn’t the destruction or the stress or the terror of Finland at war that affected Laaksonen according to his own words in a documentary shown as part of Tom of Finland: Bold Journey at the Kiasma Museum of Modern Art. No, according to Laaksonen, his military service was a huge impact on his life because (1) he was disappointed that the Finnish military uniforms were so much looser fitting than the uniforms in German Nazi propaganda and (2) the copious downtime throughout the war gave him plenty of opportunities to cruise downtown Helsinki for anonymous sexual encounters with men of all social strata.
It is at least true that the time period proved to be fruitful for the development of style he would become known for as “Tom of Finland”: impossibly muscular men, hypermasculine to the point where they defy gender stereotypes in tight naval uniforms or tight leather in situations that range from extremely suggestive to fully pornographic. Laaksonen’s drawings in the 40s still appear approximately human - with occasional soft edges and proportions that may not have existed in the real world but at least seem feasible - by the 60s he would almost exclusively be drawing men as fetishistic lumberjacks, bikers, and construction worker personifications of Gods. As Jarrett Earnest writes in his review of the Tom of Finland Retrospective in the New York Review of Books, “Repression produces its own aesthetic.”
In the mid 1950s, Laaksonen started to submit his drawings to international publications as a freelance artist. He was almost immediately picked up by Physique Pictorial, edited by the influential Bob Mizer. Under somewhat strict obscenity laws (a likely subject of a future Ends of Art History) you could not sell or mail pornography in the United States, and any full-frontal nudity was considered pornography. Due to anti-sodomy laws and cultural norms about homosexuality and bisexuality, there were also no mainstream publications catering to gay/queer men. To skirt both of these issues, there was a proliferation of magazines dedicated entirely to men’s physiques with names like Tomorrow’s Man or Grecian Guild Pictorial. Mizer was the kingpin of these magazines, even running is own modeling studio focused on men who looked straight out of a Saint Sebastian central casting call in as little clothing as possible. (Mizer would be arrested multiple times, and imprisoned at least once on charges relating to distribution of illicit material and possible prostitution). Mizer is said to have coined the name “Tom of Finland” for Laaksonen, and Laaksonen’s career took off from there. Eventually he was able to leave corporate advertising behind to work on Tom of Finland drawings full time.2
Tom of Finland: Bold Journey, which took up an entire floor and a half of the sprawling Kiasma in 2023, was, for lack of a better adjective, overwhelming. Having been somewhat familiar with the Tom of Finland drawings that appeared in the early years of Physique Pictorial, I was not expecting the turn from homoerotic innuendo to explicit outuendo (is that a word? it should be) that Tom’s drawings take in the late 60s. A series of drawings of men at the circus that opened the second room of the exhibition displayed such breadth of creative ways for one human to penetrate the body of another human across 20 images that by drawing 12 the whole enterprise achieves the sexual version of semantic satiation, everything just sort of temporarily losing all meaning.
This isn’t necessarily a negative. I can’t think of another time where I have been forced to reckon with sexuality through sexually explicit images not solely meant to titillate in a public setting, let alone in a museum with hundreds of strangers having the same experience at the same time. It’s also a way to confront two iniquitous trends of the 21st century, the Gen-Zification of puritanical sex negativity and the mainstreaming of LGB identities only when they are cis-gendered and sexless. I feel incredibly privileged to have been able to see Tom of Finland: Bold Journey, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also hard to grapple with (despite featuring an AWFUL LOT OF GRAPPLING).
Jarrett Earnest’s article covers the mainstreaming of Tom of Finland, from outsider pornographer to accepted artist, better than I could, saying that it
“slowly at first, beginning on the outskirts of the gay and erotic art worlds at the end of the last century and becoming increasingly visible over the last decade, from the MOCA Los Angeles exhibition “Bob Mizer and Tom of Finland” in 2013 to Tom of Finland’s inclusion in exhibitions at major museums (such as the Met’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” in 2019 and the Centre Pompidou’s “Over the Rainbow” in 2023). The estate is now represented by the hip blue-chip David Kordansky Gallery, which recently mounted shows in Los Angeles and New York.”
But as Earnest and other critics point out, this mainstreaming isn’t without merit from both a technical standpoint or an art historical one. From a technical standpoint, Laaksonen is a phenomenal draftsman. In particular, his ability to evoke texture in pencil or pen and ink is almost unmatched. In the case of most of his work, that texture is either leather, denim, or flesh, so he’s not necessarily evoking the same lush textiles as the Flemish and Italian masters, but it’s a rather remarkable accomplishment nonetheless. His compositions are also excellent at conveying narrative while maintaining visual interest. Finally, his overall works manage to find ways to balance the erotic with the genuinely funny - again his series Pekka at the Circus is so wildly off-balance (although, again featuring A LOT OF PRECARIOUS BALANCING) that it careens from sexy to hilarious at very high speed.
From an art history standpoint, the (straight, cis, white) male gaze has been such an established and entrenched perspective that sometimes its easy to forget that much of the Western cannon represents the peculiar sexual predilections of the art buying/commissioning class for centuries. If I have to look at one more pre-Raphaelite monstrosity that is just a painting of a naked lady titled like “Truth” or “Winter”, I’ll… … … probably do nothing, but boy will I be livid! That we are willing to take some space and try to understand how explicitly gay (and explicitly explicit) art fits into this history is good. It makes all art more interesting.
Heaven forbid somebody has to look at a dick, when they could be looking at REAL ART LIKE THIS NONSENSE.
What: Wings of the Morning by Edward Robert Hughes
Where: Private Collection
But I can’t say that I thought Bold Journey was an unqualified success. Leevi Haapala, the curator of Kiasma, did an interview with Ocula that is illuminating, but I think also starts to hint by omission at what I ultimately find disappointing about it.
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.
I have two issues with the quote, and again this is coming from somebody who is ultimately appreciative of what Haapala managed to achieve. First, the problem with this view is that it no longer is 1971 or 1981. There have been plenty of portrayals of queer joy in the public sphere before the opening of Bold Journey. That doesn’t mean that this exhibition isn’t warranted or that queer joy isn’t still a revolutionary act in some cases, but there’s a lack of deeper engagement with what Tom of Finland’s art means in the present by only focusing on its iconoclasm in the past.
The bigger, albeit related, issue is that this “new iconography” is not necessarily a purely benevolently positive aesthetic. The through line from homoerotic physique magazines to modern gay pornography that imposes and upholds a very particular ideal of what bodies gay men covet and desire is easy to trace and it’s… not great. It goes beyond body fascism into very literal fascism. Susan Sontag’s Fascinating Fascism from Under the Sign of Saturn talks quite a bit about the aesthetics of fascism, and while she is not talking about Tom of Finland, it’s easy to see how Tom’s work can be read under that lens. That Laaksonen’s oeuvre contains many drawings of Nazi German soldiers and not a few works featuring deeply questionable portrayals of people of color (notably not included and almost entirely not discussed in Bold Journey) is again… quite not great.
I don’t think that the problematic aspects of Laaksonen’s output means that we have to discount the rest of it entirely. Laaksonen, before his death, spoke eloquently about the difficulty of tackling Finland’s legacy as an ally of Germany in the Continuation War and how he has had to question both his own sexual desires and his commitment to an ideology against fascism and hatred. But, why essentially ignore all of this in Bold Journey? Too worried it would kill the vibe when perusing the Illustrated Kama Sutra of Gay Circus Acts?
I certainly was not alone in having this response. Alvin Li, a curator and writer working out of Shanghai and London, wrote a long piece about how views of Tom of Finland fall along generational divides across different LGBTQ+ communities (with my generation essentially being the middle fault line). Li writes in the Finnish National Gallery Research journal:
When asked what they think of Tom’s oeuvre, my contemporaries’ responses are uniformly marked by a certain ambivalence. One described Tom’s images as ‘homonormative’, despite feeling like there’s also ‘some nuance there’, due to an ‘(over)performance of homomasculinity’. Another, a more feisty queer, completely dismisses the type of masculinity that Tom has so masterfully invented, describing it as something to be ‘resisted’, or better yet, ignored – even though its appeal, in their mind limited to objects of popular consumption (like the ToF x JW Anderson underwear, priced at 155 USD, whose jock cup bears Tom’s drawing of two muscle gods flexing next to a boat), is by now more than well established.
I think ultimately I wish Kiasma’s curation had taken these views - Tom as icon/iconoclast and Tom as problematic emblem of the past - in dialogue. Not to get all “what if we reach across the aisle!” about it, but I think both views are valid and maybe the exhibition would have been more successful (more bold even?) had it attempted to push back against both the overly positive and overly negative perspectives.
When I worked in Finland (during the bulk of the Biden administration), one of the issues I worked on was human rights and LGBTQ+ issues. While Finland is certainly known for being a progressive and inclusive country, an issue I had in my job is that I couldn’t get Americans to stop uncritically praising Finland’s record on LGBTQ+ issues. Visitors and even fellow diplomats would deliver speeches that touted Finland as essentially a social utopia based mostly on reputation alone. While that reputation is not entirely undeserved, it’s not completely unblemished. For example until 2023, Finnish law mandated sexual sterilization for transgender people who legally changed their gender identity. I was incredibly privileged to work with some amazing NGOs, human rights activists, and people within the Finnish government to raise awareness about the harms of this law, and it was eventually amended thanks to a citizen’s initiative in 2023. But, much of my work was trying to get people to stop entering a room and declaring victory for LGBTQ+ rights uncritically, especially to an audience that was still impacted by draconian rights laws.
I think my last issue with Bold Journey (which again, is an exhibition that closed years ago, so… this is all VERY TIMELY!) is that it sort of uncritically fuels a narrative that “well, things are certainly fine enough now!” without asking questions of “why weren’t they fine before?” and “fine enough for whom?” Yes, it’s incredible and affirming and hilarious and wonderful and progressive that a major national institution would be Bold enough to make space for gay erotica as art, but it can be celebrated in a way that is more inclusive of highlighting the progress that is yet to be made. I’m even more sensitive to this now thinking back on Bold Journey than I perhaps was at the time that I first attended given the U.S.’s backsliding on trans rights. My old PhD advisor once described working on public policy as “being a tiny wheel, spinning as fast as you can, yet seemingly making no impact on your own; it isn’t until you zoom out to 30,000 feet that you see that you are part of a tectonic shift — a small part, but a part nonetheless.” Working on trans rights issues as a diplomat was like being an incredibly incredibly tiny wheel contributing to inches of progress. I can only hope that those wheels stay spinning.
The only photo I have from 2022 Helsinki Pride includes a conspicuous UK parasol because I was there as part of Diplomats for Pride. Our spot in the parade was immediately in front of Insurance Adjusters for Pride and behind the City of Helsinki Budget Office.
We’ve reached THE END(tm?) of The Ends of Art History in Finland. What a Bold Journey it has been! If this substack survives for any reasonable period of time in all likelihood it will return to the topic of Finland, which is essentially my Roman Empire.
Questions for your Study Group:
You’ve been hired by Cirque du Soleil to choreograph and artistic direct their new Tom of Finland themed show. However, you’ve never actually seen any of the drawings from “Pekka at the Circus” so you have to make the whole thing up yourself. What is your artistic vision?
What should be the “Official Christmas City” of the United States? I grew up near Indiana, Pennsylvania, which is the “Christmas Tree Capital of the World”, so maybe that?! (It’s also the hometown of noted Christmas movie actor Jimmy Stewart! So much Christmas! Plan your vacation now!)
Some Sources and Further Reading:
https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/tom-of-finland-receives-largest-ever-museum-show/
Earnest, Jarrett. “Tom’s Men”, The New York Review of Books.3
Sontag, Susan (1980). “Fascinating Fascism” Under the Sign of Saturn. New York.
Li, Alvin (2023). “Boys Will Be Boys? Some Notes on Tom of Finland” FNG Research.
https://www.frieze.com/article/tom-of-finland-bold-journey-review-2023
“The Official Christmas City of Finland” may sound like the least important of Turku’s many titles, but I assure you it is not. Turku likely had many competitors for Official Christmas City of Finland. Rovaniemi, a city that almost straddles the Arctic Circle line in Northern Finland, is Santa Claus’s official residence. Saariselkä, a small town even further north in Finland, is the entry point to Urho Kekkonen National Park, which is said to be the secret location of Father Christmas’s real toy workshop. Inari, home of Silda a museum and center of Sámi culture that is somehow even further north than Saariselkä, is home of the Porocup finals, Finland’s most prestigious reindeer race, aka the reindeer games that Rudolph was forbidden from participating in. LOTS OF OPTIONS. Turku’s claim to Christmas fame is that every year since the 1300s, the city of Turku reads a lovely declaration of Christmas Peace to start the holiday. According to the City of Turku’s website:
The tradition of reading the Declaration of Christmas Peace in Turku has continued almost uninterrupted since the 1300s. The declaration has been read on the balcony of the Brinkkala building since 1886. The current form of the declaration dates back to 1903.
According to folk memory, the tradition was interrupted: during the Russian invasion and occupation of Finland in 1712–1721 – a period also known as the Greater Wrath, possibly between 1809 and 1815, in 1917 when the militia was on strike, and in 1939 because of a fear of air raids.
The Declaration of Christmas Peace in Turku has been broadcast on the radio since 1935. National television broadcasts of the event started in 1983 and the event has also been broadcast in Sweden since 1986. Nowadays the Declaration of Christmas Peace can be viewed live around the world via the Internet.”
Most of Tom of Finland’s work is not in the public domain. However, according to Wikimedia Commons, the works featured in this article were published without a copyright notice so they are fair game (I assume, I’m not a lawyer).
I wrote an earlier version of this substack as part of an unofficial email newsletter I wrote when I was living in Finland just after having seen Bold Journey. I read Earnest’s piece nearly a year later, several months before writing this update. It is excellent and overlaps both in thought and sources with my initial review, including also referencing Sontag’s work. I highly recommend it.