Helmut Newton in Dialogue. Fashions and Fictions

Kampa Museum Prague
June 29 to October 28, 2019

The exhibition Helmut Newton in Dialogue was prepared by Museum Kampa in collaboration with Kicken Berlin. It presents photographs by the renowned German-Australian photographer Helmut Newton, placing them within the context of interwar photography and comparing them with the works of his contemporaries. Alongside other events commemorating the centenary of Meda Mládková's birth, this exhibition project aligns with Museum Kampa's exhibition program, which focuses on presenting figures associated with lifestyle and fashion who were crucial to Meda Mládková's design projects in Washington (for example, the successful exhibitions Cecil Beaton: Photographer of Queens and Manolo Blahnik: The Art of Shoes ).

Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustädter in Berlin in 1920. In many ways, his rather turbulent life reflects the history of the 20th century – due to his Jewish heritage, he had to leave his native Germany; more precisely, he managed to leave just in time and emigrated via Singapore to Australia, where he continued his training and developed the photographic skills he had acquired in pre-war Germany. In Australia, he quickly established himself as a renowned portrait and fashion photographer. Since the early 1960s, when he began producing portraits, fashion photographs, and nudes, he has been considered one of the most progressive and controversial photographers of the second half of the 20th century. His conception of the representation of women in portraits and nudes has transformed the character of these two major classical photographic genres. Gently oscillating between controversy, mystery, and eroticism, he portrayed his models as strong, active, and self-assured women of modern civilization, both in an elegant world and in places of tension or danger. He staged ambiguous and provocative scenes that transformed existing photographic genres in innovative ways. During his nearly sixty-year career, Helmut Newton brilliantly mastered the aesthetics of studio photography with meticulous attention to detail, atmosphere, and composition.

Newton shifted the meaning and role of fashion and portrait photography to broader values and forms of expression, forever changing its perception. Working for 23 years for the Australian, British, and French editions, he became particularly famous for his photographs for Vogue magazine. Besides models, Newton also photographed renowned figures from the worlds of art and fashion. His portraits of Karl Lagerfeld, Andy Warhol, Sigourney Weaver, and Paloma Picasso, for example, are very well-known.

The exhibition is divided into four sections, each presenting, step by step, Newton's sources of inspiration (Erwin Blumenfeld, František Drtikol, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, etc.) and his most productive period from 1950 to 2000. The exhibition also includes works by Newton's contemporaries (e.g., Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, etc.). The exhibition culminates in the section "Czech Traces," which presents a selection of works by Tono Stano and Gabina Fárová from the late 1980s and early 1990s (both of whom assisted Newton in Prague in 1988 in the creation of several of his photographs).

The collaboration between Helmut Newton and Kicken Berlin dates back to the 1980s. At that time, the founder Rudolf Kicken began to build his own remarkable collection of photographic works, which, supplemented by works from private collections, forms the core of the exhibition at the Kampa Museum.

Special thanks go to the F.C. Gundlach Foundation for their generous cooperation.

Exhibition curators: Petra Helck and Ina Schmidt-Runke, directors of Kicken Berlin, and Helena Musilová, chief curator of the Kampa Museum
Cooperation: Alexandra Šlosarčíková (Museum Kampa)

Museum Kampa – The Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation
U Sovových mlýnů 503/2
118 00 Prague 1 – Mala Strana
Czech Republic