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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
But there is a color picture called "Dummy and Human III," done for Oui magazine in 1977, that is entrancingly beautiful. A living nude stands at the left of the frame, seen from knee height to just below breast level. Her body is bent back. One hand rests on her hip; the other clutches the black beaded cloche on a mannequin. That dummy is kneeling, her head lowered for cunnilingus. She is in shadow, but there is light enough to pick up her jewelry and the café au lait of her exposed left breast, like a cup just stirred. It is a very sensual, tender pose, and the composition is enhanced by a careful cropping that is not common in Newton's work. The deep green fabric backdrop is very tastefully allied to the skin tones. It is a photograph, yet it conjures up thoughts of Ingres or Caravaggio in that the orgiastic stillness verges on something religious. The fact that one face is unseen and the other is in shadow is the beginning of real art.
In the section on portraits, I like a Catherine Deneuve picture from 1976, in part because it too is cropped, just above the line of her eyes. But there's frankness in the picture, an air of the tramp fighting the lady in Deneuve. It might be more striking if one didn't feel that it was derived from the way films directed by Luis Buñuel ("Belle de Jour" and "Tristana") have seen Deneuve.
There's also a striking, very tough-looking Sigourney Weaver, in a dress so drenched her nipples are like starter buttons. It gets the guy in Weaver all right, and the pose -- holding a cigarette in a raised arm -- is very intriguing. But it doesn't get her matching vulnerability, and it's finally not as compelling as some of the best views of her in the "Alien" films.
Newton has had an odd life, and this book is not very helpful about explaining him. It implies that he is Jewish, but never actually states it. I'd like to know so much more about how he worked in Berlin until December 1938, and then went to Singapore for two years before ending up in Australia. Was he ever drawn to photograph those places? There's one picture of him from 1958, taken by his wife, June (she works as Alice Springs): It shows a melancholy, wolfish face, with a sad, tough con man's gaze. Then there's another, from 1987, in Monte Carlo (where they live) of Newton sitting in shorts and wearing fancy high-heeled shoes. Here the look is complacent, superior, sneering; it's not a kind or an interested face. And I'm bound to add that in the history of good photography many artists' faces are filled with the curiosity they feel about looking. Newton's look, in contrast, is mean-spirited and past surprise. The coroner feels he has seen it all.
