Helmut Newton’s Riviera exhibited in Monaco
The New National Museum of Monaco brings together in a remarkable exhibition prints by the photographer, most of which were taken on the Mediterranean coast.
The perfume of scandal that surrounded the work of Helmut Newton (1920-2004) having evaporated since others, like Juergen Teller, pulverized the codes of this porno-chic aesthetic that he had invented, the hour came to rethink his work in a different light. The publisher José Alvarez, his friend, worked on it in a passionate book. Helmut and June, cross portraits (Grasset) weaves the links between his photos and his childhood in 1930s Berlin, which he was forced to flee in 1938 because he was Jewish. This remarkable exhibition concocted by Guillaume de Sardes also underlines how much his images borrow from surrealism. The prints presented here, mostly fashion, were all made on the Riviera. They are populated by strong women like his mother, evolving in palaces similar to those where his parents took him, or at the edge of beautiful swimming pools, which were for this son of the German upper middle class a refuge when the Nazis arrived. in power. The themes dear to the surrealists are omnipresent there. That of the doll, for example, games of mirrors, of the night, of BDSM (bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sado-masochism), quint to the images of Hans Bellmer, Man Ray or Pierre Molinier. The course, dense, offers a dive into the heart of this work much richer and more complex than it seems, sparing beautiful breaths like this set of portraits of stars or more intimate images.
Have
s “Newton, French Riviera”. Until November 13, New National Museum of Monaco (98). www.nmnm.mc Catalog: NMNM / Gallimard / Prestel, 352 pages, €39.