For the Review’s Art Issue, Jarrett Earnest looks at Tom of Finland’s work, which, since debuting on the cover of the spring 1957 issue of Physique Pictorial, has gone from erotic samizdat passed among gay men to blue-chip art celebrated at the Met. “Hard-core pornography, blurring into the mainstream, has never been more accessible,” writes Earnest. “As a culture we are warring about politics, about bodies, about gender, about sex, and flexing at those intersections stands Tom of Finland, who has never looked more like an old master.”

Below, alongside Earnest’s article, we have compiled a selection from the archives about art, desire, and eroticism.

Jarrett Earnest
Tom’s Men

Tom of Finland’s work has transformed from midcentury gay pornography to twenty-first-century art, but its troubling dimensions, as well as the ways it has creatively shaped the desires of a diverse range of queer people, cannot be ignored.

Richard Dorment
Beautiful, Aesthetic, Erotic

“Sensuous textures and deep, saturated colors are used to create a sultry atmosphere of stifled desire. Edward Burne-Jones learned a lesson from his run-in with the Old Water-Colour Society: everyone in the picture is fully clothed and yet the effect is of a hothouse simmering with sexual tension.”

John Richardson
Bacon Agonistes

“As for gay artists, the only ones Bacon had a kind word for were Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, and the pornographer known as Tom of Finland. About the Wolfenden Report, I remember Francis echoing his nanny: ‘They should bring back hanging for buggery.’ He was certainly not the only gay Englishman for whom guilt was intrinsic to sex.”

Lucy Sante
The Unexamined Life

“He is most famous for depicting erotica, or at least its signs, symbols, and byproducts, but his depiction is invariably ice-cold. He emerged from the social and artistic fringe to present himself as an exemplar of a nearly forgotten classicism, and he upset the art world less by his graphically sexual subject matter than by his closure, his symmetry, his deliberateness, his polish—his frank pursuit of beauty. He may be denounced today as a symptom of rampant moral relativism, but he was on his own terms an absolutist.”

Susan Sontag
Fascinating Fascism

“In the sex shops, the baths, the leather bars, the brothels, people are dragging out their gear. But why? Why has Nazi Germany, which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic? How could a regime which persecuted homosexuals become a gay turn-on?”

Francis Haskell
A Strange Painter

“Ingres was a man whose devoted fidelity to Raphael and to his two successive wives was a legend in his lifetime—a lifetime that embraced the Romantic era, which established the cult of Michelangelo, and the Second Empire, which established the cult of adultery—and yet his feeblest pictures are those which depend most on Raphael, and his most poignant are those which celebrate guilty passion.”

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