A place in the sun – Style – Kommersant

The New National Museum of Monaco is open until mid-November for the exhibition “Newton, Riviera”: 280 photographs taken by Helmut Newton in the south of France, where the famous photographer lived his most productive and free years of his career.

“I love the sun, but it is no longer in Paris,” Newton, 61, confidently told a Monaco immigration officer. He accepted his application for residency and asked why, after 20 years of living in Paris, Monsieur suddenly decided to move to the south.

It would be nice if only the sun. It was not the first time for a photographer to change his place of residence and passport. Helmut Neustadter was born in Berlin in 1920. He fled from Nazi Germany at the age of 18, taking with him the fashion photography lessons he received from Iva, his mentor, who was among the first to engage live models in filming, and the propaganda pictures of Leni Riefenstahl, which stuck in the memory of a novice photographer for life. He spoke about this himself, and more than once. After all, fashion is also a dictatorship. Yes, and spontaneity, that very signature “decisive moment” of Cartier-Bresson, Newton was never given. He decisively failed him. The escape from the Nazi-occupied homeland will end in Australia. He will serve the war as a driver, receive an Australian passport, and with it a new name – Helmut Newton.

There, in Australia, he will meet his muse and wife, actress June Brown. She is Alice Springs when it comes to photography, her creative pseudonym is the name of the Australian city of the same name. June and Newton moved to Paris at the beginning of the golden age of ready-to-wear in the 1960s. Newton, with his camera and hands – and about the brutal working conditions of today, no, no, and horror stories come out – made this unrestrained era of gloss and consumption, where sex sold everything and everyone. “A good fashion photo should look like anything but a fashion photo,” Newton repeated his mantra.

So they would have lived in the capital of fashion, perfume and Vogue, if not for Francois Mitterrand. With his election in 1981, France groaned with taxes. Someone had to pay for the better life for the people promised by the first socialist president. Big money, sensing something was wrong, set sail in all directions. After consulting with a lawyer, the Newtons also set sail. The harbor of Monaco beckoned the pragmatic photographer not so much with a bright sun as with a fiscal shadow.

The exhibition opens with the famous portrait of Alice Springs. On it, Newton is not a guy with a bad reputation in the usual jacket and with a glamorous squint, but a cheerful uncle at home: a hat, a linen white shirt and shoes on thin, long legs – a click on the nose of all the girls of Monaco. And then there is a no less famous shot from the American Vogue of 1975, taken by Newton himself for Calvin Klein: a woman on the couch in a decisive masculine pose is ready to move on to seduction. Men and women in Newton’s world often reversed roles. “No, no, he was not gay,” a Monegasque museum employee justifies herself to American tourists. But he was always ready to revel and in every possible way supported the legend of an insatiable lover.

Although, looking at photographs of June from their secluded nest in Ramatuelle, you understand that in the eyes of the one looking at her, buttoned up, there is much more passion and desire than in the most outspoken “big naked” (Big Nudes, 1981). There is work, here are feelings. In this house, the couple spent the summer months before moving to Monaco. The photo chronicle shows unpretentious everyday life in the very heart of a beautiful life: Club 55, and with it the whole of Saint-Tropez, buzzes through the fence. But on the other side of the lens there are no lights and ostentatious passions: family underpants, a glass, friends of varying degrees of fame. It seems that cicadas are crackling through these pseudo-simple pictures, which today can be slapped on an iPhone in a minute. Is it that the leopard, with which June languidly lay down posing for Newton, betrays the proximity of glamorous everyday life. In the rest – everything is like with people. People on the Riviera (“I shoot only those I understand” is another credo of a photographer who considered himself his own in this world of beautiful people). Here is the motley crowd of the Cannes Film Festival, diamonds, polished hotels, 500-dollar bills, balconies of skyscrapers and girls of any color – either mermaids or prostitutes. And here are simple human joys: bad weather, a beach with towels, the sea in the background. Although he always preferred pools to the sea – both for swimming and for filming. “Everything that is beautiful is all imitation and falsehood,” said the photographer.

The curators want to show not only the textbook advertising Newton, seen many times (the campaigns of Prada, Versace, Thierry Mugler, Blumarine with Monica Bellucci and Carla Bruni were filmed in Monaco), but also the experimental artist. Among the mystical night shots, for which he had a weakness and in which it is customary to see the influence of the surrealists, one stands out in particular – 1975: naked June tries to hold on to a tree branch, as if gusts of wind could indeed carry away her body, like some weightless object. Anxiety emanates from black-and-white night seascapes with a floating horizon – not at all Newtonian, as if with the onset of night another camera is taken. And the culmination of this gloomy theme is his last lifetime exhibition “The Yellow Press” (Zurich, 2002). For many years, Newton was fond of scenes of crimes and murders, now and then he got into the shoes of either the director of a thriller, or the paparazzi, and filmed crime stories. The hero of one of them was the American artist and hooligan Maurizio Cattelan, who surveys the victim with deadly seriousness.

It is amazing how dominant and excessive Newton photographed women and how calm, but still artificial in his portraits of men. Jude Law with languid shadows on his tanned face, Luciano Pavarotti singing, Sylvester Stallone in an idiotic tuxedo on the beach, young Lagerfeld with a burning beard in an odalisque pose, Bertolucci’s sizzling gaze, disheveled Larry Clark and monumental, like sculptures by Vera Mukhina, the Prince of Monaco at the foot of grandfather statues.

Helmut Newton was the favorite photographer of the Princess of Monaco and Hanover Caroline. I shot it a lot, on different occasions and in different scenery: from a formal portrait to a beach one. At her own request, for many years he photographed the dancers of the Monte Carlo Ballet, the main cultural brainchild of the princess. All photographs are from Carolina’s private collection, so seeing them is a chance for both Newton fans and balletomanes, who do not immediately recognize the stars of the Parisian opera of the 1970s in the bitchy ballerina and the dreamy young poet, and later the first leaders of the Monegasque troupe Ghylain Tesmar and Pierre Lacotte.

Maria Sidelnikova