Helmut Newton is a fashion photographer, close to Yves Saint-Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. Working for Vogue, Playboy, Spiegel and Stern, he looks for eroticism beyond charm. He publishes his first two books in New York. White Women, in 1976, confronts the nude and the dressed. Sleepless nights, in 1978, partly photographed in the streets of Paris, adds the mystery of wax mannequins and is in colors.
A further step is reached from 1980 with the appreciation by the artist of the expressive force of very large formats applied in black and white to standing female nudes with sculptural bodies. The high-heeled shoes worn by naked women bring an effect of power and dominance that demonstrates the completion of the sexual revolution. The third book of the artist, Big Nudes, published in Paris in 1981, is a collection of these images.
Big Nudes includes a diptych titled Sie kommen. In the studio without decoration, four women walk forward as in a fashion show. They have the same full frontal position and the same attitude on both photos. On the left they are elegantly dressed. On the right they are naked on their high heels.
In the largest format on which the four women are life-size, each photo of the diptych is separated into two elements. A set of four 193 x 99 cm exhibition panels, each numbered II/III and annotated in 1995 for the Venice Biennal, was sold for $ 660K including premium by Christie's on December 16, 2008.
In a similar format, a group of four unmounted prints numbered 1/3 is estimated $ 600K for sale by Phillips in New York on April 4, lot 85.
A Sie kommen diptych in two elements 106 x 106 cm without the central separation of each image was sold for $ 670K including premium by Sotheby's on April 3, 2016.
SOLD for $ 1.82M including premium
A further step is reached from 1980 with the appreciation by the artist of the expressive force of very large formats applied in black and white to standing female nudes with sculptural bodies. The high-heeled shoes worn by naked women bring an effect of power and dominance that demonstrates the completion of the sexual revolution. The third book of the artist, Big Nudes, published in Paris in 1981, is a collection of these images.
Big Nudes includes a diptych titled Sie kommen. In the studio without decoration, four women walk forward as in a fashion show. They have the same full frontal position and the same attitude on both photos. On the left they are elegantly dressed. On the right they are naked on their high heels.
In the largest format on which the four women are life-size, each photo of the diptych is separated into two elements. A set of four 193 x 99 cm exhibition panels, each numbered II/III and annotated in 1995 for the Venice Biennal, was sold for $ 660K including premium by Christie's on December 16, 2008.
In a similar format, a group of four unmounted prints numbered 1/3 is estimated $ 600K for sale by Phillips in New York on April 4, lot 85.
A Sie kommen diptych in two elements 106 x 106 cm without the central separation of each image was sold for $ 670K including premium by Sotheby's on April 3, 2016.
SOLD for $ 1.82M including premium
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