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A naked girl filed under a cluttered desk — “Young Women Lying Under My Desk, Château Marmont” — a girl tied up in a car, monumental nudes towering in their heels ... The work of Helmut Newton, on show from Thursday at Hamiltons gallery, remains what could best be euphemistically termed, right on the edge.
So acceptable is the classy Newton, who died five years ago, that even Topshop — teenage-innocent-central — recently used his work in an ad campaign. His prices, even now, continue to climb, reaching a record $662,500 in December.
Such is his reputation that to pop by the gallery and, wide-eyed, ask “but is it art?” makes one feel ever so slightly like Hans Christian Andersen's little boy, who shouted (aptly enough): “But he isn't wearing any clothes!”
Gallery owner Tim Jefferies first dealt in Newton in the Eighties, when his work sold for a few thousand. He's right when he says that “his place at the top table of photography is assured” but the lines between art and pornography remain out of focus.
In a commercial art gallery anything goes: “People won't be shocked,” says Jefferies of the show, “because they know what to expect from a show of Helmut Newton.”
Even so what's tolerated in the fashionably free private sector is a scandal in a public space or indeed in the work place.
Neville Keighley wrote a very funny book about his adventures in what he terms “posh porn”, Touching Wood. He shares an extremely mainstream agent with Piers Morgan but when I tried to log on to his production company Film Erotica, my PC's firewall said, “I don't think so…”
In 1990, the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati was prosecuted for obscenity in a show by Robert Mapplethorpe. Elton John lent his Nan Goldin collection to the Baltic, only to have one of the works seized by the police.
Likewise Newton blurs the lines between fashion and porn to a degree that renders it invisible. But the cleverest thing about him is that his double standards are our own.
Sex and the City rarely provoked comment. A Cabinet minister's husband expensing crummy films is grubby: less because it's sordid than because it puts a woman with genuine power in the same story as women with none.
Newton's women inhabit a glossy universe: the Negresco, Eden Rock, St Tropez, the Château Marmont are his domestic settings and their natural habitat.
It's fair to assume that your average porn star doesn't live the enchanted life of Newton's muses. Yet not even supermodels are super-human. Kate Moss, aged 14, it is often reported, cried the first time a photographer got her to take all her clothes off.
My favourite Newton image is Self Portrait with Model. He put a mirror above the bed, draped a model all over him, pointed the camera at the ceiling and shot.
The girl is there, despite their sleepily tangled limbs, not for any kind of feeling but because it makes a good picture.
The mirror reflects them both, her face hidden in his neck, his looking straight into the lens as if to say: “Exploitative? Guilty as charged.”
If there's a brutality to his work, it's one that any artist to a greater or lesser degree buys into, the moment they start to write, paint, or photograph life.
Helmut Newton's photographs are at Hamiltons Gallery, London W1, from Thursday to 19 June.
Reader views (1)
Nice article. Helmut Newton's comment whenever he was pushed on this subject was to say: 'I'm just a gun for hire'. I can't but feel this attitude is what comes acros most from his work, in other words he knew that 'sex always sells'.
- Ray, Milano, Italy, 12/05/2009 16:26
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