![]() ![]() The mannequin's eyes are fixed, glassy, eternal, whereas the woman's are still vaguely pained, as if she cannot fully forget the erosions caused by aging. It is also left to us to appreciate the implicit insult to the living woman, that she is nearly but not entirely dead. The living woman's breast is not bad, but pessimists might detect those telltale warnings of sag (or gravity), that extra lining of flesh in the lower curve, the fall of Eve. There's the blond, naked above the waist, turned to look over the camera's left shoulder, her hand reaching back to caress the breast of her twin, a blond mannequin - except that the twin's breast is finer, more exactly conical, the nipple harder. There are some haunting images in that vein, quite arresting if you're a connoisseur of all our contemporary forms of death. He uses mannequins, dummies, whatever you want to call them - they are the perfect bodies that come in sections and that sell clothes in those very public forms of prison, the bright store windows. The celebrities should pay attention to one of Newton's favorite ploys, that of putting warm bodies with plaster or porcelain simulacra. He is not looking for lives or faces so much as attitude, the kind of sensuality poised on the edge of disease, a lean, meatlike nudity in which beauties seem ready to hang on the butcher's hook - illustrious corpses, tender joints. (Newton was born in 1920, in Berlin, and this book was made to coincide with a major show at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin from November 2000 to January 2001.) But what sort of artist is one to have been so dependent on the fashion industry for work and who, by his own admission, prefers to do portraits of the "infamous" - movie stars, politicians, the rich and the scandalous - in short, those who find a certain glamour in being photographed by Newton, as if it paid for their place in the modern gallery of celebrity guilt.īut those who have their portraits done should train themselves in the way he treats his fashion models. ![]() The publication of "Helmut Newton Work," an albumlike book with a chronology of all the exhibits Newton has had, is ostensibly the celebration of a great artist at 80. ![]() Perhaps they also miss what could be their own memorials, done in a blancmange marble one might mistake for flesh. They say, "Isn't he perverse, depraved and shocking?" But in the delusions of glee they fail to notice little Newton's monotonous enthusiasm for death, for some trick or slick of the light that can make a living human corpselike. The editors of those magazines congratulate themselves on the cutting-edge autopsies he brings to their pages. But grown-ups don't have to scare so easily. ![]()
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