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.
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. tom of finland -2017-
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. The undisputed cornerstone of the 2017 celebration was