The Provocative and Sensual World of Helmut Newton: Unraveling the Master behind Iconic and Subversive Imagery

A new retrospective in the port city of A Caruña in Galicia, Spain is showcasing the work of German post-war fashion photographer Helmut Newton. The exhibition, titled "Helmut Newton - Fact & Fiction," explores his career shooting for magazines such as Vogue, Playboy, and Harpers Bazaar from the 1950s to the early 2000s. It delves into his mercurial character, which combined playfulness and angst. The showcase is a sophisticated display of female empowerment and erotic suggestion, featuring models adorned in stockings, suspenders, jodhpurs, and leathers without apology.

A Newton picture can be many things at once: provocative, titillating even, but also amusing and confusing. His iconic Big Nudes prints from 1980 are larger-than-life-size and full frontal. Yet, his nudes exude armor. His celebrity portraits framed actressesfrom Raquel Welch to Charlotte Ramplingin challenging stances. And in the 1970s, photographing with carte blanche for Vogue France, he invented a bold monochrome visual languageblack lingerie, insouciant countenance, power plays and decadent interiorsthat has been widely imitated in the years since.

The post-war fashion photographer has a complex and controversial legacy, particularly in relation to how he captured female subjects.

Mathieu Ridelle

The stark contrasts in his art reflected the dramatic shifts in his own life story. Born Helmut Neustädter in 1920 into a Jewish industrialist family in Berlin, he fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, finding refuge first in Singapore and then Australia. He married Australian actress June Browne in 1948, who served as an early model and later found her own success as a photographer under the name Alice Springs. Their marriage lasted over fifty years. This unsettling depiction of femininity has continued to captivate audiences for forty years.

Newton's artistic vision in the 1960s was heavily influenced by the noir aesthetic of Hungarian photographer Brassaï and the suspenseful style of Alfred Hitchcock (a Newton shoot for Christian Dior echoes "Vertigo"). This period marked his shift towards celebrating the sculptural qualities of women's bodies and depicting men as foolish, subservient, or lifeless.

His erotic images earned him the nickname "King of Kink."

Helmut Newton

Newton first met Philippe Garner, a young photographs specialist at Sotheby's in the mid-1970s. Garner, who has now curated the Spanish show with Matthias Harder, director of the Helmut Newton Foundation, and the British art dealer Tim Jefferies, remembered Newton as a friend who "created a parallel universe rooted in everything you know and recognize."

It's interesting that Newton's perspective on sexuality has not been targeted by cancel culture. According to Garner, the work contains layers, contradictions, and ambiguities, creating a strange balance between fact and fiction that makes it difficult to confront and condemn outright. Additionally, "Helmut was perfectly happy for people to loathe his pictures," Garner adds.

Newton frequently juxtaposed elegant evening attire with the unforgiving brightness of daylight, as shown in this image of "Elsa Peretti as a Bunny." In the photograph, taken in 1975 on a rooftop terrace in New York, the philanthropist and jewelry designer is seen wearing a Halston bunny costume.

Helmut Newton

In 1976, Newton captured his iconic equestrian model at Hôtel Lancaster on the Champs Élysées. The photo shoot was for Hermès, but as often seen in Newton's work, the composition took precedence over the product. Garner observed that he created "images that stopped you in your tracks." Although it was fashion photography, the clothes played a supporting role. Newton didn't only focus on Paris; he also had a talent for capturing glamorous cities, taking commissions in Monte Carlo, Berlin, and Vienna, and working in the vibrant light of California and the south of France. A friend jokingly remarked that "only mad dogs and Helmut Newton go out in the midday sun." Newton spent his winters in Los Angeles, where he suffered a fatal heart attack in 2004 while driving his Cadillac.

He photographed a number of famous starlets, including Monica Bellucci in this 2001 image "Monte Carlo."

The exhibition showcases Helmut Newton's fetishistic interests and elegant style through a display of his personal possessions, including bondage Barbie dolls, cigarette holders, high-heeled shoes, and a worn Louis Vuitton camera case. In addition to his iconic works, unexpected surprises are also featured, such as a portrait capturing a subtly nervous Margaret Thatcher and a series of introspective landscapes that reveal Newton's more contemplative side.

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The MOP Foundation, located in a complex of former warehouses and silos on the city's port, pays homage to its industrial roots with bunker-chic galleries and salted metalwork. The geometric Atlantic harbor serves as a dramatic backdrop for the presentation of Newton's work, with the curators ingeniously displaying his smallest works - exquisite test-shot Polaroids - in one of the vast silos. Visitors can voyeuristically peer into palm-sized soft-hued images of semi-dressed models lounging on Parisian sofas, New York balconies, and the decks of Mediterranean yachts.

Newton, shown here in a self-portrait taken in 1993, is the subject of a new retrospective exhibition in Spain.

Marta Ortega Perez, the chairwoman of Inditex, a Spanish multinational clothing company founded by her father, hosts the show through her foundation. She emphasized that her foundation's focus is on fashion, photography, and her hometown, with the goal of promoting her city to the world and bringing the world to her city. She described it as a "really nice challenge" that they are excited to take on.

An empowered woman changing the story? She might as well be the focus of a Helmut Newton photo.

Experience "Helmut Newton - Fact & Fiction" until May 1, 2024 at the Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.