Tom Of Finland -2017- -

By the close of 2017, Tom of Finland was no longer a secret. The Tom of Finland Foundation, based in Los Angeles and dedicated to preserving erotic art, saw its membership and donations skyrocket. Major fashion houses—Saint Laurent, Balenciaga—explicitly cited his line work in their collections. His imagery, once hidden in wallets and tucked under mattresses, was now available on phone cases, coffee table books, and (briefly) official postal mail.

The undisputed cornerstone of the 2017 celebration was the landmark exhibition, Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play , which opened at Artists Space in New York before traveling to MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. This was not a small, niche gallery show for fetishists. This was a major institutional survey, curated by the esteemed art historian Richard D. Meyer. tom of finland -2017-

The 2017 revival did not occur in a vacuum. It coincided with the rise of the #MeToo movement and an intense cultural debate about masculinity, power, and consent. Critics on the left occasionally questioned Tom’s aesthetic: was his celebration of the “male animal” simply a replication of toxic, patriarchal power structures? Were his depictions of uniformed authority figures (cops, soldiers) politically problematic in an era of police brutality and militarism? By the close of 2017, Tom of Finland was no longer a secret

Pekka Strang delivered a haunting performance as Laaksonen, depicting him as a World War II veteran whose wartime experiences—shooting Soviet soldiers and witnessing death—informed his later obsession with powerful, uniformed men. The film showed Tom not as a hedonistic provocateur, but as a shy, chain-smoking graphic designer by day who built a fantasy world at night to escape the crushing loneliness of 1950s Helsinki. It highlighted his decades-long love affair with his partner, Veli “Nipa” Mäkinen, a relationship that provided domestic stability while his art ran wild. By humanizing Tom, the 2017 biopic ensured that the man was not lost in the mythology of his own creation. Audiences left understanding that the hyper-masculine posturing on paper was a form of therapy, a tool for survival. His imagery, once hidden in wallets and tucked

2017 also saw the release of the feature film Tom of Finland , directed by Dome Karukoski. While the film had premiered at festivals in late 2016, its wide international release in 2017 solidified the centennial narrative. Crucially, the biopic did not focus on the fantastical men of his drawings, but on the quiet, traumatized man who created them.

The exhibition’s genius lay in its refusal to apologize. Previous attempts to show Tom’s work often framed it as a sociological curiosity—a symptom of pre-Stonewall oppression or post-AIDS anxiety. The Pleasure of Play did the radical opposite: it argued for Laaksonen as a formal master of line and shade. It placed his drawings of uniformed policemen, bikers, and loggers directly in dialogue with the classical traditions he admired: the idealized physiques of Greek vases, the heroic sculptures of Auguste Rodin, and the muscular realism of George Quaintance.