| January 17, 2015 - March 7, 2015 |
Los Angeles, CA |
David Kordansky Gallery
presents:
Early Work 1944 – 1972
Touko Laaksonen a.k.a. Tom of Finland (1920 – 1991) is widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s most influential artists for his revolutionary representation of the male figure. His drawings of fantastically muscled men engrossed in acts of homoerotic desire comprise one of the most inventive portrayals of the humans body in modern times. These pictures of gay men as virile, confident, and unashamed–equally radical for their near illicit, underground distribution–originated an empowering queer iconography and liberating spirit that increasingly inspires popular culture.
TOM OF FINLAND (Touko Laaksonen,
Finnish, 1920 – 1991), |
This exhibition surveys the artist’s formative years across fifteen works, each selected in close collaboration with the Los Angeles-based Tom of Finland Foundation. These graphite drawings, gouaches, and inked storyboards–the majority of which have never been shown before–broadly trace the evolution of Tom’s exquisite draftsmanship and compositions from his earliest extant erotic works, executed just after serving in the Finnish Army during WWII, through to a complete comic produced in 1972, the year before Tom both earned his first solo exhibition, and retired from his advertising career to devote himself full-time to his art.
Among the earliest works featured is a group of rare sketches from 1944 depicting clothed couples enjoying sensual trysts. The delicate fashion-illustrational style and the coifed hairstyles reflect the era, but the exposed and exaggerated genitalia, a burgeoning pre-steroid musculature, and most significantly, expressions of pride and playfulness signal Tom’s pioneering approach to sexuality. At the time, homosexuality was unequivocally taboo, if not illegal, and the dominant image of gay men was that of weakness, sickness, and effeteness. In a masterful 1947 gouache on view, Tom both flouts and acknowledges these prejudices with the depiction of a commanding, strong-jawed figure discreetly pleasuring his companion. The picture also displays an early fetish for leather and military garb, trappings Tom would adopt throughout his world as symbols of power and masculinity.
A selection of finished drawings from 1957 to 1970 further redefines archetypes. Beginning with Bob Mizer’s LA-based beefcake magazine Physique Pictorial, Tom began publishing his pictures as multi-image stories in proto-zine periodicals. To populate this expanding universe, he (predating the appropriations of punk) radically coopted working class, macho, and heterosexual identities, in particular the bikers, sailors, cowboys, and circus performers on view. Seen here idyllically cavorting, these Adonises emulate the aspiring freedoms of the decade. Each composition is charged as much with moments of looking as touching, mirroring the gaze of the viewer, and suggesting a heightened openness to the dynamics of visibility.
The exhibition’s chronology culminates in a 1972 multi-panel comic featuring Kake, Tom’s recurring alter ego superhero and the original gay leatherman clone, seducing a “Tom’s TV” repairman during a house call. Published as Kake Vol. 11 TV Repair, one of 26 stories the artist released from 1968 to 1986, this sequence of 20 images (plus cover) comprise the final photo-ready artwork for press production. Accordingly, Tom supplants his graphite tonal gradients with the graphic, commercial art punch of pen and gouache, and the character of Kake, an easygoing if horny everyman, takes on a Sunday morning regularity. Similarly, the ecstasy of TV Repair is set within a conventional house with framed artwork on its walls. The artworks are photo-collaged reproductions of Tom’s own “dirty drawings”, and what is suggestively invoked is a world in which the permissiveness of Tom of Finland is a part of every living room.
An accompanying, fully illustrated catalogue, designed by Brian Roettinger and featuring an essay by Kevin McGarry, will be published.
Critic's Pick
In 1956, Finnish draftsman Touko Laaksonen (1920–1991) submitted a drawing of two strapping lumberjacks to a popular American beefcake magazine, Physique Pictorial. The drawing was accepted as a cover, attributed to Tom of Finland—an Anglicized approximation of Touko with the artist’s geographic origin thrown in for tempered exoticism. A contrast between traditional aesthetics and raunchy subject matter in the lumberjacks drawing would characterize his oeuvre for decades. The thirteen drawings, one gouache, and one multipanel narrative on view in this frisky exhibition span the years of 1944 to 1972 and illustrate that by the late seventies Laaksonen’s suggestiveness had given way to unabashed homoeroticism. Saturated by Western heroic representation that harkens to the Vatican Laocoön sculpture, these works shun that era’s prevailing stereotype of gay effeminacy, instead championing prodigiously vigorous homosexuals pleasuring one another, their expressions glib, their gaze triumphant.
TOM OF FINLAND, untitled, 1972, ink, gouache, and cut-and-pasted photo on paper. From the series “TV Repair,” 1972. © 1972 Tom of Finland Foundation Those familiar with Laaksonen’s larger body of work will probably notice that the 1972 TV Repair series, which shows the artist’s alter ego—all hard muscled and leather clad—seducing a repairman, is a pendant to his 1946 ink-and-gouache-on-paper series Bob’s Tale, Pt. 1. In the latter, two large and assertive male visitors seduce Bob, who is also modeled after Laaksonen. Both seductions feature his familiar erotic trope—the subject first surprised, then compliant, later ecstatic—but with one significant shift: After twenty-odd years of erotic drawings, the artist’s alter ego finally graduated from seduced to seducer, from Touko to Tom. The following year, 1973, Tom of Finland, an advertising designer by day, piano player by night, whose drawings began as a furtive labor of love, launched his official art career with his first art show in Hamburg.
— Julia Friedman, Artforum
January 17, 2015
David Kordansky Gallery
Photos by Lorenzo Gomez
