Helmut Newton - Photographs London Thursday, November 5, 2015 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Christie's, New York, 15 April 2010, lot 318

  • Literature

    Helmut Newton: Mode et Portraits, exh. cat., Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1984, pl. 70
    H. Newton, Portraits, Pantheon Books, 1987, pl. 14
    Portraits: Helmut Newton, National Portrait Gallery, London, 1988, p. 25
    D. Faccioli, C. Marra, Helmut Newton: V.I.P. Very Important Portraits, Photology, 1992, p. 27
    Helmut Newton: Aus dem Photographischen Werk, Schirmer/Mosel, 1993, p. 22
    H. Newton, A. Springs, Us and Them, Scalo, 1999, p. 121
    All for the last frame

  • Catalogue Essay

    Helmut Newton created a world as coherent as any novelist or as arresting as any visionary painter. Astoundingly, he built this world with great success within the confnes of fashion photography. From inside this soft, sensual and humorous tableaux, he creates a place inhabited by larger-than-life women who dominate their domestic arenas with varying degrees of fetish. In the oversized contact sheet entitled Self Portrait with Wife and Models, we are privileged to witness the creation of one of these tiny utopias: the master and his muse, exposure of naked skin, the repetition and rhythm of curves and spikey heels, and finally, the realisation that everyone in the image has become the model. How superbly Newtonian.

  • Artist Biography

    Helmut Newton

    German • 1920 - 2004

    Helmut Newton's distinct style of eroticism and highly produced images was deemed rebellious and revolutionary in its time, as he turned the expected notion of beauty, depicted by passive and submissive women, on its head. Depicting his models as strong and powerful women, Newton reversed gender stereotypes and examined society's understanding of female desire.

    Newton created a working space for his models that was part decadent and part unorthodox — a safe microcosm in which fantasies became reality. And perhaps most famously of all, Newton engendered an environment in which his female models claimed the space around them with unapologetic poise and commanding sensuality. His almost cinematic compositions provided a hyper-real backdrop for the provocative images of sculptural, larger-than-life women, and enhanced the themes of voyeurism and fetishism that run throughout his work.

    View More Works

28

Self Portrait with Wife and Models, Paris

1981
Oversized gelatin silver contact sheet.
163 x 125 cm (64 1/8 x 49 1/4 in.)
Overall 203.8 x 163.3 cm (80 1/4 x 64 1/4 in.)

Signed, titled, dated and numbered 5/15 in pencil on the verso.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 

Contact Specialist
Lou Proud
Head of Photographs
London
+ 44 207 318 4018

Photographs

London Auction 6 November 2015 2pm