He was the visionary (and the great voyeur) of sensuality combined with elegance. Helmut Newton (don’t call him an artist who comes out of the grave and blasts us with his Rolleyflex) is the photographer who best portrayed skin, joys and shadows, apotheosis and decay. The fresh fruit and the withered flowers. He was the author who always walked the tightrope between what was permitted and what was prohibited, morbidity and delicacy.
At five years old. Little Helmut Newton (1920-2004) pretended to be asleep to watch his nannies undress and, when his mother went out to dinner or to the opera, he liked to hug her and cling to her generous, Prussian breasts that smelled of perfume. that had just been released on the market: Chanel No. 5.
As a teenager he saw the effervescence of neon, cabaret, and the nocturnal and extreme enjoyment of the Weimar Republic in which there was no tomorrow. And there was none: monetary superinflation and, then, the Nazis. Nudes of powerful women, portraits of powerful women, almost abstract landscapes, polaroids and fashion, a lot of fashion.
The Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation (MOP), the president of Inditex, presents Fact and fiction, a photographic show in space in the port of A Coruña. First it was Peter Lindbergh, followed by Steven Meisel and now it is the turn of Newton, the hired gun (that’s what he called himself) who took fashion photography, designed for magazines and not museums, to extremes never seen before.
With a setting of very dim lights and a surprising variety of work, the three curators have worked an aesthetic miracle and opened the eyes of viewers who see far beyond the obvious, who ask questions. Vase women or powerful women?
Spectators who not only see the spirit of Newton and his wife, June (aka Alice Spring), floating in the air, have also signed up for the party Goya, Velázquez, Manet, Yves Saint Laurent, the VIP list is extensive. At the party, Jerry Hall with a raw steak in the eye, who hit him?
Naomi Campbell parades dressed only in some necklaces; and Margaret Thatcher, one of the most powerful women in history, in a portrait that she always hated. As one of the guides at the exhibition in A Coruña says, the photographer sometimes said: “It’s fantastic to imagine that you are sleeping with Margaret Thatcher.”
The trio of curators is outstanding: Philippe Garner, an eminence in photography at Sotheby’s, Phillip’s and friend of the Newtons; the curator of the Newton Foundation, Matthias Harder, and Tim Jefferies, the London gallerist who was the first to exhibit the author’s work in 1984 in a place other than a magazine.
“The three musketeers, the three curators who got together to put together the exhibition, wanted to do something very special,” Garner explains to Magazine. The MOP Foundation gave us carte blanche, to do what we wanted, to make it of the highest caliber, to fulfill our dream,” she details.
“Thus, everything we exhibit was printed during his lifetime,” he guarantees, “there are no copies. It is important to remember that Helmut was a magazine photographer, especially between the fifties and mid-seventies. “People knew his work in magazines, not in galleries.”
Both Garner and Harder remember that Newton was a “commercial” photographer who did not think of himself as an artist. “At most I could accept the word author. In the exhibition – they add – you can not only see how fabulous the printed photos are but also the idea of ??how hard-working he was. He said: ‘I don’t take photos to put them in a drawer, but so that they can be published and people can see them.’”
In reality, there are photos, those of the landscapes in his three paradises, Paris, Monte Carlo and Los Angeles (and surrounding areas), that he sometimes took for pleasure, for pleasure, as a testament. “When he said,” explains Garner, “that he was a gun for hire,” it was because his assignments energized him, gave him energy. It is true that he is known for his fashion photos and he was very aware that his job was to capture attention, deceive the reader, to make the photo stay on your skin.
The battery dock is stripped bare in the darkness, with the lights very low, to talk about the Newton who knew who and where he photographed. “Helmut was always very aware of the limits in which he showed nudity, sexuality. He knew that he had much more freedom in French Vogue than in the American edition, but he wanted to push the limits, provoke, destabilize, and also seduce the viewer. That’s part of his reason for being, always asking what was acceptable, what was appropriate,” Garner analyzes.
There are a few, lesser-known works that elevate Newton far above that figure who receives commissions in his apartment overlooking the Monte Carlo sea and bags full of banknotes. He paints Monica Bellucci’s lips over a napkin that theoretically serves to remove lipstick. Lips painted twice. A nod to the one he adored Man Ray.
He photographs a naked model in front of the mirror in a trench coat advertisement. It is he who is reflected. A great maneuver. She sometimes likes to appear in the definitive photos like Velázquez in Las Meninas or reproduces Venus in the mirror in her apartment on Aubriot Street, where the mirror is a television. Newton is a bit Hitchcock in his films, he appears at the most unexpected and hidden moments. Another photo commissioned by a wine brand: in the image, a banquet with naked people enjoying food and drink. The brand rejected it. Time elevated her.
