Tom of Finland: the iconography was drawn before it was photographed

Almost everything on this site is about photographs and films. This page is about a man with a pencil, and the argument for putting him here is straightforward: the iconography that photography later recorded had already been settled in drawings.

The work is sexually explicit and is not reproduced or described here. What can be described, and what is worth describing, is the draughtsmanship, the distribution and the documented public record, because those are the things that explain why a private habit in Helsinki ended up on a national postage stamp.

The technique is the least discussed part of it

Laaksonen worked in graphite pencil on paper for most of his life, and the drawings are strange objects when you look at them as drawings.

There is almost no line in the finished work in the sense a draughtsman would usually mean. Form is built out of graduated tone, worked and reworked until the transitions are continuous and the surfaces read the way a photograph reads when the focus is slightly soft. The effect is deliberately photographic, which is worth sitting with: a hand-made image that has gone to enormous trouble to look like a mechanical one, in a period when the mechanical version could not be made, sold or posted.

The labour was real. These are not sketches, and the density of the shading is the reason a single drawing could take a long time. After 1988, when emphysema left him with hand tremors, he moved to pastel, which does not demand the same sustained pressure. The change is visible in the late work and it is the plainest evidence available of how physical the earlier method was.

Exaggeration as a signalling system

The bodies are drawn at proportions nobody has. This is usually treated as fantasy, and it is, but it is also a technical decision with a precedent.

Heraldry exaggerates for the same reason. A sign has to be identifiable at a distance, in poor conditions, by someone who has seen it before and needs to recognise it fast. Push the shoulders, narrow the waist, enlarge the boots and simplify the face, and you get a figure that survives bad reproduction on cheap paper in a small magazine posted across an ocean. The exaggeration is not just appetite. It is legibility engineering for a distribution channel with no quality control.

The same logic runs through the garments. The cap, the jacket, the harness, the boots and the collar are all drawn as high-contrast shapes with hard edges, and they are drawn the same way every time. Repetition is what turns a costume into a vocabulary, and the serialised comic strips built around the recurring character Kake, twenty-six of them published between 1968 and 1986, are where the repetition was industrialised.

Where the garments came from

The vocabulary is visibly assembled out of two existing wardrobes, military and motorcycle. Both were already coded as masculine, both were designed for weather and abrasion rather than display, and both came with their own hierarchy of insignia.

Laaksonen had worn one of them. He was conscripted in February 1940 and served as an anti-aircraft officer through the war. Writers have made a great deal of the connection between that service and what he later drew, and it is not something this page can establish. The two facts sit next to each other in the record, and the drawings themselves make the borrowing from uniform dress obvious without any biography being required.

What the borrowing accomplished is clearer. A collar in a Tom of Finland drawing is not an isolated object with an uncertain meaning. It arrives as one element of a complete costume in which every other element is also legible, and a sign inside a system is far easier to read than a sign on its own. That is the mechanism examined in the collar in painting, running at full strength.

What the drawings grant the figure lower in the hierarchy

Apply this site’s fourth pass to his work and the result is more interesting than the reputation suggests.

The drawings are full of explicit power relations, and the figure in the subordinate position is consistently given the same treatment as the figure above them. The same tonal care, the same physical scale, the same light, the same relish in the description of the body. Nobody is drawn small, faceless or generic in order to make somebody else look larger, which is the standard method for indicating rank in a picture and is available to any draughtsman who wants it.

Compare that with the century of painting in which a bound figure is described in loving detail precisely so that the viewer can enjoy an object. There the care is a form of consumption. Here the care is distributed evenly, which produces the odd effect his admirers describe as cheerfulness. Whatever else is happening in a Tom of Finland drawing, no one in it has been diminished by the person holding the pencil.

Set the drawings beside Robert Mapplethorpe and the difference in method is total while the subject overlaps almost exactly. Mapplethorpe photographed a real subculture with the formal apparatus of classical sculpture, in the same decades and partly in the same milieu. Laaksonen drew an invented one, in pencil, alone, and the invented version arrived first.

The public record afterwards

The Tom of Finland Foundation was established in 1984, co-founded by Laaksonen with Durk Dehner, initially to preserve the work and later to hold a wider archive. Founding an archive while the artist is alive is unusual and it is why the documentation is so complete.

He died in Helsinki on 7 November 1991. The Museum of Modern Art acquired five drawings in 2006. LACMA, SFMOMA and the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago hold work. In April 2014 the Finnish postal service announced a set of three first-class stamps drawn from his images, released on 8 September that year, pre-ordered from well over a hundred countries and reported as the best-selling stamp issue in the service’s history. A biographical feature directed by Dome Karukoski was released in February 2017.

That is a fairly complete circuit for any artist: private drawings, mail-order magazines, an archive, museum collections, a national postage stamp and a film. It is a remarkable one for a body of work that could not legally be posted through most of the countries it reached.

The reason it belongs on an art site rather than a history site is the pencil. Everything else in this material was recorded. This was designed, one graduated tone at a time, and the study in cord and shoulder hanging in the gallery is a small argument for the same proposition from the opposite end of the scale: that a drawing can describe a relation of pressure and consent more exactly than a photograph of the same thing, because a drawing only contains what somebody decided to put in it.