Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Helmut Newton is a connoisseur of contemporary sex and death.
Apr 25, 2001 | Photographer Helmut Newton is what Vogue and Vanity Fair regard as a naughty boy. But grown-ups don't have to scare so easily. The editors of those magazines congratulate themselves on the cutting-edge autopsies he brings to their pages. They say, "Isn't he perverse, depraved and shocking?" But in the delusions of glee they fail to notice little Newton's monotonous enthusiasm for death, for some trick or slick of the light that can make a living human corpselike. Perhaps they also miss what could be their own memorials, done in a blancmange marble one might mistake for flesh.
The publication of "Helmut Newton Work," an albumlike book with a chronology of all the exhibits Newton has had, is ostensibly the celebration of a great artist at 80. (Newton was born in 1920, in Berlin, and this book was made to coincide with a major show at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin from November 2000 to January 2001.) But what sort of artist is one to have been so dependent on the fashion industry for work and who, by his own admission, prefers to do portraits of the "infamous" -- movie stars, politicians, the rich and the scandalous -- in short, those who find a certain glamour in being photographed by Newton, as if it paid for their place in the modern gallery of celebrity guilt.
But those who have their portraits done should train themselves in the way he treats his fashion models. He is not looking for lives or faces so much as attitude, the kind of sensuality poised on the edge of disease, a lean, meatlike nudity in which beauties seem ready to hang on the butcher's hook -- illustrious corpses, tender joints. The celebrities should pay attention to one of Newton's favorite ploys, that of putting warm bodies with plaster or porcelain simulacra. He uses mannequins, dummies, whatever you want to call them -- they are the perfect bodies that come in sections and that sell clothes in those very public forms of prison, the bright store windows.
There are some haunting images in that vein, quite arresting if you're a connoisseur of all our contemporary forms of death. There's the blond, naked above the waist, turned to look over the camera's left shoulder, her hand reaching back to caress the breast of her twin, a blond mannequin -- except that the twin's breast is finer, more exactly conical, the nipple harder. The living woman's breast is not bad, but pessimists might detect those telltale warnings of sag (or gravity), that extra lining of flesh in the lower curve, the fall of Eve. It is also left to us to appreciate the implicit insult to the living woman, that she is nearly but not entirely dead. The mannequin's eyes are fixed, glassy, eternal, whereas the woman's are still vaguely pained, as if she cannot fully forget the erosions caused by aging.
I like another thing about this picture -- the way the two figures have been jolted out of an embrace by the light, and are placed in a bourgeois room with fragments of an armoire and a forlorn "old master" on the wall. There is a vestige of the social critic still in Newton, and it burns wanly in this air of intrigue in the parents' fusty old house. But it could have been a great picture if Newton had had real danger in his eye, if the living woman had had the lurid wounds of some operation, a mastectomy perhaps. Newton is never brave enough for such ordinary outrages. He can mock beauty, but he is squeamish about real damage.
Still, I would rather have that picture, or some of the other mannequin shots, than all the flagrant, contemptuous views of tall, nude models, with their skin not just sleek or slippery but often oiled and varnished. Indeed, the only handles you could discover are the breasts, the blank faces and the shaggy clumps of pubic hair. These are heartless pictures, drab erotica, with an odd air of the concentration camp about them -- an Auschwitz for perfect bodies. Again, that is a subtext that Newton hints at without grasping. I doubt that Vogue or Vanity Fair would go that far.
