![]() ![]() Newton produced his first portrait of a giant, a large figure somewhat resembling another couturier, Yves Saint-Laurent, with a nude, reduced to the dimensions of a doll and clad only in silver high heels with a red feather boa over her arm, in 1974.īy 1975, Newton was exhibiting his fashion portraits, both in colour and black-and-white, in New York, Paris and Amsterdam. This puts him in compatible company with an artist like Allen Jones, whose woman on all fours supporting a glass tabletop has much in common with Newton's models. He was described ambitiously (by Klaus Honnef) as "following in the tradition created by Adolphe de Meyer, and developed by Hoyningen-Heine, Steichen, Munkacsi, Blumenfeld, Horst, Penn and Avedon", while Newton's friend, the couturier Karl Lagerfeld, claimed he subscribed to the dictum that: "The concept of art should not kill the concept of artificiality, because that's where its artistic expression comes from." Newton also said that "everything that is beautiful is a fake. ![]() It was not until the 1970s that Newton began to attract the international attention that would contextualise his work within a different tradition. The shift to French Vogue gave Newton the opportunity to contribute his particular brand of fashion photography to the Jardin des Modes, Elle, Queen, Nova, Marie-Claire, Stern and to Playboy. In 1956, the pair spent a year in London before moving to Paris, where they lived until 1981. Helmut worked primarily as a fashion photographer, and assumed Australian nationality, but was hankering for Europe. The Newtons remained in Australia for 17 years. This not only enhanced the notion of the photographer/voyeur, but necessarily rendered all viewers fellow-accomplices in the implicitly sadomasochistic sexual fantasy. Later on, she would coach his models to pose for him in roles that played on the whimsical cruelties of a dominatrix. Not only did she dress up and model extensively in a series of storytelling tableaux vivants, but she lent her lighting and scene-setting skills to the preparation of a number of his images. Her influence seems to have been considerable: the notion of a model as actress is hardly a new one, but Browne's collaboration with Newton, on both sides of the camera, was substantial. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the Australian Army, and after settling in Sydney, he met and, in 1948, married the photographer and actress June F Browne, also known as June Brunell, and, more improbably, as Alice Springs. The situation in Berlin became increasingly more dangerous for Jews, and in 1938 he left for Singapore, and then Australia. Newton bought his first camera in 1932, and by the age of 17 had apprenticed himself to the theatrical photographer Yva (Else Simon). Yet her androgynously sensual presence pervaded his obsessive fascination with strikingly tall models wearing the glossily lacquered hairstyles and the seamed stockings of the 1940s. The meeting was not a success - she took umbrage at a light-hearted comment - and the portrait was never taken. In love with Marlene Dietrich, so he said, from the time he attended the American School, where he went at the age of 12, he met her years later when they were both in New York and he was to take her portrait. He was born Helmut Neustädter, into a middle-class family in Weimar republic Berlin, where decadence and smoky nostalgia were the order of every film, poster, song or cabaret of the day. ![]()
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