Helmut Newton. Cars
Press Conference: 13 May 2026, 12 noon & Opening: 15 May 2026, 10 am // Villa Olmo at Lake Como/Italy
Following the initiative by Italian luxury brand Larusmiani, the Newton Foundation will open the exhibition Helmut Newton. Cars on May 15th, 2026. This time, the venue is the garden of Villa Olmo on Lake Como, which will be transformed into a vast open-air museum as part of the FuoriConcorso Automotive Culture event. Across 20 large-format panels, the automobile is celebrated through a selection of Newton’s car photographs, taken between 1956 and 2001. At the same time, this is the first exhibition dedicated to this important theme in Newton’s body of work, which will be explored further in a larger presentation at the Berlin-based Newton Foundation in the near future. In Como itself, Newton worked repeatedly from the 1970s onward, most notably by the lake or at Villa d’Este and its famous garden.
Helmut Newton also had a lifelong passion for cars; it is therefore no surprise that this subject matter occupied an important place in his fashion photography over the decades, and that he later went on to produce and shoot advertising campaigns for numerous renowned automobile brands. It all began in the mid-1950s, when Newton, during a holiday trip to Rome, used his white Porsche 356 as a backdrop for a private portrait of his wife June on the Via Appia Antica – or shortly thereafter, back in Melbourne, in a fashion shoot for Australian Vogue. In the early 1960s, he photographed men’s fashion for Adam magazine at the Jaguar factory in Coventry, and women’s fashion in color, en plein air, for French Vogue, this time featuring a red Fiat 1200. In 1963, he portrayed Françoise Sagan in a Jaguar E-Type, also for French Vogue, while the British model Jean Shrimpton, in a Newton fashion shoot for British Vogue in 1966, was transformed into the hood ornament of a Rolls-Royce – miniaturized and collaged into the photographic composition.
One highlight of the current show is the first-ever presentation of a fashion photograph taken in Como, created in 1996 for Italian Vogue: a blonde woman with heavily teased hair, wearing a tight black cocktail dress, stands beside an Alfa Romeo Spider. In the open trunk, we see an opened briefcase filled with bundles of 100,000-lira banknotes. The sports car bears a license plate from the city of Como. The story behind this cache of banknotes is, of course, a matter of speculation – a strikingly characteristic and ambivalent element in Newton’s fashion imagery.
