While the overarching theme of the PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography is expansive—“ being human”—the headline Helmut Newton exhibition is an intimate look at the artist’s life and trajectory. Festival artistic director Elias Redstone, like many, was very familiar with Newton’s most circulated works—the elegant, sexy fashion images of the 1950s— but has discovered new perspectives through In Focus.
From 200 exhibition items, there are not only 78 original photos (many from Berlin’s Helmut Newton Foundation) but also objects such as first-edition magazines featuring Newton’s work, his passport stamped with a “J” for Jew, and other ephemera loaned from institutions, private collectors and libraries.
“I am personally excited to see a real exploration of his work, charting his life back to the time he spent in Australia, and in Melbourne in particular,” Redstone says. Those beginnings include Newton’s Jewish roots and life in Berlin (he was born Helmut Neustädter), his escape from Germany at the outbreak of World War II, his 1940 internment at Tatura in regional Victoria as an “enemy alien”, and his joining the Australian Army in 1942. It will also cover his post-war life and marriage to actress, artist and photographer June Newton, who worked under the pseudonym ‘Alice Springs’.
“With a great artist of any kind, we tend to know the work they are most famous for and I always think it is interesting to understand how they got to that point and how they defined their ideas, aesthetic or approach,” Redstone says. “That period includes 1946, the year he opened his photographic studio in Flinders Lane, Melbourne. He was working prolifically until French Vogue headhunted him and he moved back to Europe in 1961.”
Helmut Newton: In Focus
Jewish Museum of Australia: Gandel Centre of Judaica
(As part of PHOTO 2022)
29 April—29 January 2023
This article was originally published in the May/June 2022 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
An exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane sheds a new light on Brisbane’s history, presenting a significant historical archive of photography alongside contemporary artists responding to the original source material.
In a conversation with Lauren Carroll Harris for her survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Julie Rrap discusses 40 years of challenging the male gaze, and the cultural invisibility of the ageing female body.
Natalya Hughes has a conflicted fascination with modernist men like Freud, Kirchner and de Kooning. Jane O’Sullivan takes a look at The Interior, the Institute of Modern Art monograph on her recent practice, and discovers difficult and provocative questions about not just the representation of women in art and culture, but also the careers of women artists in Australia.
