TOM OF FINLAND MADE IN GERMANY

TOM OF FINLAND MADE IN GERMANY

Born Touko Laaksonen in 1920, his iconic depiction of self-assured, life-affirming sexuality provided decisive impetus to the international gay movement from the 1960s onward. While we clearly associate his portraits of sensual and powerful cowboys, farmhands, soldiers, and leatherworkers with the United States, Tom of Finland's rise to gay icon received its revolutionary impetus neither in his native Finland nor in the United States. It was, of all places, the city of Hamburg and Tom's friendship with leading figures in the local gay scene in the early 1970s that helped him secure his first-ever exhibition. He even created a large mural for the legendary "Tom's Bar," to this day the only one legitimately named after him. Regular commissions to design posters and advertisements for gay events in Hamburg allowed him to launch his artistic career after leaving his day job as an advertising executive and led to the creation of the largest private collection of his drawings to date. The book includes texts by Juerg Judin, Pay Matthis Karstens, Kati Mustola and Alice Delage, conversations with Durk Dehner and Michael P. Hartleben and a facsimile of the artist’s German travel diary from 1955.