Newton, Riviera
Opening: 4 September 2025, 7 pm // Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin
On 4 September 2025, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin will open its new double exhibition: Newton, Riviera and Dialogues. Collection FOTOGRAFIS x Helmut Newton.
In the summer of 2022, the Helmut Newton Foundation’s director Matthias Harder and Guillaume de Sardes co-curated the exhibition Newton, Riviera for the historic Villa Sauber in Monte Carlo. For the first time, this late-life home of the Newtons – and the surrounding region where many of Helmut Newton’s iconic images were created – took center stage. A selection from that exhibition will now be shown in Berlin, running in parallel with Dialogues. Collection FOTOGRAFIS x Helmut Newton. This continues the foundation’s focus on Newton’s personal and professional environments, following acclaimed exhibitions such as Hollywood (2022) and Berlin, Berlin (2024/25).
At the turn of the year 1981/82, Helmut Newton and his wife June relocated from Paris to Monte Carlo. The move marked not only a shift in their private lives, but also a dramatic change in Newton’s photographic settings and perspective. Gone was the effortless elegance of Parisian chic; in its place, Newton turned his lens on the Riviera’s glamorous social scene – often set against the stark concrete walls of Monaco’s many construction sites. Even the modest garage of their apartment building became a stage for his bold, conceptually sharp fashion stories for magazines and designers, as well as for the enigmatic black-and-white series The Woman on Level 4.
Newton’s love for the French Riviera, however, ran deeper still. As early as 1964, he and June purchased a small stone house near Ramatuelle, not far from Saint-Tropez. It became both a summer retreat and a space for creative work, as evidenced by black-and-white images shot for Vogue US and vibrant color photographs for the Pentax calendar. The exhibition includes a wide range of early prints, including unique vintage and lifetime prints.
During the 1980s and ‘90s, Newton’s unconventional fashion shoots took him to Cannes and Nice, and later to other parts of the Riviera: Cap d’Antibes, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Menton, and even across the Italian border to Bordighera. Across these locations, he explored his three signature genres – fashion, portrait, and nude – with the region’s distinctive light playing a central role. At times, he also captured serene nocturnal seascapes from his Monaco balcony. Similarly atmospheric landscapes emerged during the mid-1990s in Berlin, culminating in his 2001 gallery show Sex and Landscapes at Galerie de Pury & Luxembourg in Zurich. A version of the exhibition was also presented at the opening of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin in June 2004, shortly after Newton’s death. Now, more than 20 years later, this new presentation of large-format original prints brings that trajectory full circle.
Photographs taken along the Riviera appear in nearly all of Newton’s exhibitions and publications – from White Women in 1976 to Yellow Press in 2003. The coastline served as a backdrop in countless ways – sometimes spectacularly, sometimes subtly. His final photo shoot, a fashion series for Vogue Italia, also took place on the Monaco coast.
