The Tom of Finland Foundation has championed Laaksonen’s work so effectively that it’s now displayed at leading galleries including New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His posthumous success has undoubtedly been bolstered by the fact that in 1984, towards the end of his life, Laaksonen founded a non-profit foundation with his friend Durk Dehner to preserve and promote his catalogue of more than 3,500 illustrations. But nevertheless, his more explicit work retains an unwavering capacity to shock. It’s also become a globally recognised brand to the extent that you can now buy a Tom of Finland tea towel on Amazon.
His hyper-masculine aesthetic has influenced Freddie Mercury, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Village People, fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, and photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber. His work, which he liked to call ‘dirty drawings’, first found an audience on the gay underground in the 1950s and 1960s, but since then has edged ever closer to mainstream acceptance. For more than 50 years until his death in 1991, the artist better known as ‘Tom of Finland’ drew gay men in a way that was radical: his muscular young hunks were happy, playful and unashamedly sexual, without being menacing. Touko Laaksonen’s groundbreaking gay erotic art has made him a global icon.
