Helmut Newton, a native Berliner, cosmopolitan man and provocateur of fashion and portrait photography, would have turned one hundred this October. On the occasion of the centennial, Kicken Berlin, together with Berlin galleries Friese and Meyer Riegger, are repositioning some of Newton’s works from private collections in a dialogue with works by contemporary artists. At Galerie Friese, Newton’s works are shown alongside the erotically charged paintings of American artist William N. Copley (1919—1996). Meyer Riegger has invited British artist Jonathan Monk (*1969) to react directly to Newton’s photography. The parallel exhibitions encompass the subjects of physicality, sexuality, fetish, and power. The conversations among the various works — photographs, paintings, drawings, and installations — transcend eras and genres and illustrate how roles and identities, moralities and society can be provocatively charged and discussed on new terms.

Helmut Newton, whom Galerie Kicken represented exclusively from 1989 for more than a decade, establishing his oeuvre on the international art market, laid bare in his work the artistic potential of commercial photography. He united the genres of fashion, portrait and nude photography in complex ways, blurring the boundaries between them. His contribution to the history of photography reflects the history of the medium and traces, as though enlarged under a magnifying glass, a psychogram of the societal developments of his time. His work picks up the traditional lines of each genre and exaggerates each in glamorous, sexually charged scenes.

Newton, born in 1920 as Helmut Neustädter, had his roots in the culture of the metropolis of Berlin. His heroes were the illustrious reporters of his day: Egon Erwin Kisch, Martin Munkácsi, Erich Salomon. In Yva’s photography atelier between 1936 and 1938 he learned the arts of writing with light and subtle installation. In 1938 he emigrated to Australia where he established himself as a photographer. From the late 1950s, Newton worked for British and French publications like Vogue and Elle  from London and then from 1961 from Paris. After 1981, he lived alternately in Monaco and Los Angeles.

In the years to come he would hone his unmistakeable visual language. Whereas some of his earlier fashion reportages drew on cinematic motives by Luis Buñuel or Alfred Hitchcock, he began in the 1970s to develop his own tense scenes of high-society worlds and the metropolises of old Europe.

Newton’s protagonists are “strong” women in two senses. They present themselves to the camera with challenging self confidence and aggressive sexuality but also sometimes in poses of voluntary submission and ambiguous androgyny. Newton aggressively situated the female body in his images, such as in the monumental nude portraits Big Nudes. Sex and power but also his fascination with strong personalities shaped Newton’s visual realm.

From the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, Newton dedicated himself to the portrait. Assignments for Vanity Fair  and other magazines put stars and politicians, socialites and artists before his camera. He expressed his interest in his counterparts: “I photograph the people I love and admire, the famous and especially the infamous.”