Moving over wide areas of gay sexual possibility his protagonists, none the less, have - and this is his brilliance and his shortcoming - a fantasist's monomaniacal similarity.
Tom of Finland improvised, in simple and explicit line-drawings, a fantasy-world of uncomplicated and exaggerated male sexuality. Over a career span of almost fifty years, he created thousands of images beginning in the 1940s,įig.1. Admired by important gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Waters and David Hockney, Touko Laaksonen, better known under the pseudonym Tom of Finland (1920-1991), is without a doubt one of the most influential figures in 20th-century homoerotic art.
