From from June 18 until November 13, 2022, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM), in collaboration with the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, presents 280 photographs by Helmut Newton in the exhibition Newton, Riviera (English catalogue: Amazon.com, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk).
The curators of the exhibition, Matthias Harder and Guillaume de Sardes, primarily focus on the years from 1981 to 2004, but their show and catalogue also looks at Helmut Newton’s historic links with the Côte d’Azur and the area around Bordighera, Italy. The catalogue features essays by a range of experts in photography, film and art as well as three interviews, including one with Paloma Picasso.
Helmut Newton was in his sixties and already a well-established photographer when he and his wife moved to the French Riviera in 1981. At an age when many people would consider retirement, Newton instead plunged headfirst into one of the most prolific and liberating stages of his career. The city of Monaco was the perfect backdrop for his fashion photography, and it also provided him with a wealth of subjects for his famous portraits, including the stars of the Ballet de Monte-Carlo and the Princely Family. And it was in Monaco that Newton finally tried his hand at landscapes. In Newton, Riviera, we discover a dazzling Newton’s ironic yet fascinated interpretation of a way of life characterised by ease and elegance, a world dominated by appearance and superficiality. A veritable living theatre, in which he was both a player on the stage, and a privileged member of the audience.
“I love the sunshine. We don’t see it in Paris any more”. These were, allegedly, the words spoken by Helmut Newton to the Monegasque official in charge of processing his papers. The year was 1981. Newton was sixty-one years old and, thanks to a succession of daring series that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable, had forged a reputation as one of the greatest fashion photographers of his generation.
The period between 1981 and 2004 (the year of his death) would prove to be one of the most prolific, and incontrovertibly the most liberated, of his entire career. Monaco provided Helmut Newton with a most original setting for his fashion photography. He used the city’s construction sites as backdrops for luxury fashion house campaigns and the garage of his apartment house as a stage for several fashion editorials.
It was here too, that he produced a great many portraits of “beautiful people”, some of whom had taken up residence in Monaco, others merely passing through. His works from this period also include portraits of the dancers of the Ballets de Monte-Carlo and the Princely Family. In Monaco, Newton finally did landscapes, a genre of photography that he had never previously explored. There, he also developed “Yellow Press”, one of his most personal series, full of strange, disquietingly glamorous images inspired by crime scenes.
Sublimation of violence and pornography
In his catalogue essay “Newton: Both Sides of the Coin”, co-curator Guillaume de Sardes writes that he tries to present Newton’s work in all its complexity, by painting a double portrait of him: on the one hand, the photographer of fashion and “beautiful people” that everyone knows, and on the other, the artist who earned, in his own words, a “bad reputation” by applying the Surrealists’ programme of “total insubordination”.
He explores, among many other aspects, Helmut Newton’s sublimation of violence and pornography. The link between the photographer’s work and Surrealism is a shared proclivity for the set of practices – bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadomasochism, in short BDSM.
Guillaume de Sardes explains that, in 1930, Michel Leiris commissioned Jacques-André Boiffard to take photographs of this genre for issue no. 8 of the magazine Documents. At the time, above all, Man Ray (with Lee Miller, then Meret Oppenheim) and Hans Bellmer (with Unica Zürn) were responsible for the most transgressive BDSM-stagings.
According Guillaume de Sardes , Helmut Newton’s iconography matches that of the Surrealists. Of the many BDSM-inspired images that Newton produced throughout his career, the most outstanding are the famous 1976 photograph of a horse-woman on all fours on a bed with a Hermès saddle on her back. The photographer must have been particularly fond of it, as he gave his friend Ago Demirdjian a small print of it as a birthday present, and the one from 1980 and his house in Ramatuelle, where we see a bare-breasted young brunette tied up with rope (a motif reprised in 2000 in his series The Woman on Level 4).
While Helmut Newton was discreet in confiding his fondness for nineteenth-century erotic photography to Klaus Honnef, he bluntly told another critic, “I still find the sadomasochism movements very interesting.” Like the Surrealists, he was an avid reader of Lviv-born Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (Amazon.com). Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) is the professor, writer and journalist, after whom the term masochism was coined in 1886 (during Sacher-Masoch’s lifetime!) by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, because the author of Venus in Furs not only wrote about sexual fantasies and fetishes, he lived them in real life, for instance making himself by contract the slave of his mistress Baroness Fanny Pistor for the period of six months.
Helmut Newton discovered a copy of Venus in Furs in the family library when he was a child. In the early 1960s, he came upon a rare edition of Dominique Aury’s Histoire d’O [Story of O] in a bookshop. Published under the pseudonym Pauline Réage, with a preface by Jean Paulhan, a close friend of Paul Éluard and André Breton, the novel tells the story of how a young woman called O becomes a sex slave. Newton admitted that this book “had a profound influence on my fashion photographs”.
But, according to Guillaume de Sardes, it was apparently only later in life, in the 1980s and at the invitation of filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, that Helmut Newton first attended an S&M party in Los Angeles, which he photographed in a series that has remained unpublished until now.
Helmut Newton’s interest in the BDSM scene was primarily aesthetic. In his 2003 Autobiography (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk), he acknowledges the fascination that Berlin’s prostitutes had for him as a teenager: “The way the whores dressed was extraordinary. Even they had an inborn feel for fashion that was brought out in the way they dressed themselves to attract the customer – a sense of showing what their specialties were by the way they dressed…. Many were dressed in boots – really high boots, like military boots – with whips, and chains around their necks and around their arms.”
Guillaume de Sardes concludes that, if Alain Fleischer has got it right that “It is in pornography that photography finds its ultima Thule, its ideal object, its raison d’être” (La Pornographie, une idée fixe de la photographie, 2000), then it could be said that Newton found in the BDSM aesthetic a way to sublimate this pornographic temptation. BDSM, in short, may have facilitated an escape from the banality of the raw image.
This is just a small example of what you can find in the catalogue. The book and exhibition offer a new look at the work of one of the 20th century’s foremost photographers through a fascinating collection of images, some that have become famous, others rarely displayed to the public. In her catalogue preface, the Princess of Hanover rightly writes that the appearance of ease is the mark of the greatest.
As for Helmut Newton himself, he reportedly said: “People who write about photography are only writing for other people who write about photography”. Regarding art critics, he remarked: “The main thing is that they spell my name right.” I hope I did that in my review.
The book / catalogue
Edited by Matthias Harder and Guillaume de Sardes: Newton, Riviera, Prestel, July 2022, 352 pages with 150 color and 150 b/w illustrations. Order the English edition of the catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk.
With texts and interviews signed by the curators of the exhibition, Matthias Harder and Guillaume de Sardes, as well as contributions by: Ivan Barlafante (visual artist), Alain Fleisher (filmmaker, photographer and writer), Simone Klein (consultant and photography specialist), Jean-Christophe Maillot (choreographer-director of the Ballets de Monte-Carlo), Charles de Meaux (visual artist and director), Edouard Merino (collector and founder of the Air de Paris art gallery), Catherine Millet (art critic and writer), Jean-Luc Monterosso (founder and director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie), Paloma Picasso (fashion designer) and Philippe Serieys (former assistant to Helmut Newton).
This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Newton, Riviera at Villa Sauber, NMNM, from June 18 until November 13, 2022.
The Newton, Riviera book cover shows the photograph by Helmut Newton: Woman Examining Man, Calvin Klein, American Vogue, taken in Saint-Tropez in 1975 for Vogue USA. Photo from the Collection of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book / exhibition review are not between quotation marks.
Exhibition and book review added on August 27, 2022 at 07:10 Monaco time.
