Erotic ambiguity in the photographs of Helmut Newton and Bettina Rheims

THE idea that the human body can be beautiful is the single greatest legacy of Greek art, and it is a far more original one than we often imagine.

Bettina Rheims, Leo I

THE idea that the human body can be beautiful is the single greatest legacy of Greek art, and it is a far more original and momentous one than we often imagine.

For it is not natural to think of the body as beautiful; what is natural and universal is to respond to bodies sexually, as somewhere on a scale from attractive or arousing to indifferent or even repellent. Fortunately our reaction to bodies is only a small part of what determines our interaction with other people: it is sometimes prominent in first impressions, but generally recedes on further acquaintance.

What was new about the Greek image of the body, as it began to take shape in archaic statues, was the conception of the figure not as more or less sexually appealing, but as possessing formal qualities of harmony and equilibrium akin to those described by geometry or music. The Greek figure might represent a god or a victorious athlete, he might be associated with the ideal citizen who was also of necessity a citizen soldier - a connection suggested in the similarity of the words for these two social roles, polites and hoplites - but above all he was a symbol of man as a creature endowed with virtue, reason and the capacity for autonomy.

These were not images of real people but embodiments of an idea of human potential, symbols of self-confidence that we can broadly call humanistic. And it was because of the example of Greek art that the human figure came to dominate Western painting and sculpture as well as coming to represent the highest ideal of beauty - unlike the Chinese tradition, for example, where the essence of beauty is found in nature and the landscape.

But there was always an ambiguity, a knife edge between the ideal of beauty and the physicality of desire, which recurs throughout ancient and modern thinking about beauty: the paradox of disinterested interest that is at the heart of the aesthetic experience is even more acute when the erotic is involved. And of course the classical ideal was complicated by the rise of Christianity with its conception of the fallen body, perfect when first created by God but now tainted by original sin.

The sense of the body as morally compromised, if not inherently concupiscent, seems today to have entered into a toxic amalgam with the indulgent values of consumer culture to produce what is gradually being recognised as a social, medical and economic disaster. Real bodies have never been perfect; people can be relatively tall or short, thin or fat, strong or weak, all within what we may consider normal bounds. But today we are surrounded by bizarre extremes: a crisis of obesity that not surprisingly coincides with a crisis of anorexia, just as the torpid inertia of so many coincides with the exercise addiction and narcissistic musculation of others.

What is curious, from a detached perspective, is why we have such difficulty finding a sane balance between absurd extremes. Why don't people just throw out the junk food, soft drinks, frozen meals - together with the diet products and protein powders - and simply cook fresh food, eat in moderation and take a bit of exercise? Instead, the consumer reflex is to purchase yet more goods or services - diet foods or gym memberships, or even diet fad books. What is needed, however, is not more products but less; not more consumption but a fundamental deconsumerisation.

The situation was very different even a few decades ago. Or perhaps we should say the problem was still nascent in the years represented by an intriguing exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW devoted to two celebrated photographers associated with the fashion business, but whose work is of wider interest than that. Bettina Rheims's pictures in the Modern Lovers series were made in 1989-90, almost a quarter of a century ago; those of her mentor Helmut Newton date in some cases from the same period, but mostly from 10 to 15 years earlier.

Rheims's pictures are particularly interesting in relation to questions of innocence, guilt and the shadow of sin, for they are all of very young people, between puberty and early adulthood. This was an age often represented in Greek sculpture too; the term ephebe, for a young man, means one who is just upon the stage of first full growth referred to as hebe. But there is nothing really innocent or serene about Rheims's boys and girls, who are all more or less subtly troubled by the intimations of desire, anxiety or self-consciousness.

What is particularly striking about this series is the way it ponders the androgyny of the very youthful. In some cases - as in Leo I - we are almost uncertain of the sex of the individual, in others they seem deliberately reversed, as in the picture of Martine, short-haired and mannish despite her open shirt and visible bra, juxtaposed with the seductively smiling and knowingly effeminate Rajat. The complexities evoked are like those Shakespeare sets up in As You Like It or Twelfth Night, where at the end Orsino is relieved to find Viola is really a girl after all and not the boy, Cesario, she was pretending to be, while Olivia, who has also fallen in love with Viola's male alter ego, is united with the latter's twin, Sebastian.

The point of Rheims's pictures is in part to recall that the androgynous is not necessarily the same thing as the sexually neutral; Newton's photographs, in contrast, represent women who have clearly passed the boundary of ambiguity, yet remain for the most part poised at the earliest stage of adult beauty, like the glamorous Violetta, Paris (1979), who lies naked on a bed, smoking and dreaming with a faraway look in her eyes, her willowy body and creamy flesh punctuated by the dark hair that mark sexual maturity and which seems like a quotation from Man Ray's wonderfully sensual pictures of the young Meret Oppenheim.

There are other quotations in Newton's work too, like the pair of photographs of a masked woman standing by the sea at Monte Carlo - the place names in his titles ring with the dolce vita glamour of locations not yet bulldozed by the vulgarity of more recent mass tourism - which clearly recalls Goya's Clothed Maja (c. 1803) and Nude Maja (c. 1797-1800). Interestingly, the clothed version is sexier than the naked one because, as Roland Barthes said, the most erotic part of the body is where the clothing opens to reveal a glimpse of flesh, and also because the costume give greater definition to her figure.

The theme of clothes parting is explicit in another picture, Roselyne Behind Fence (1975), in which the model, standing behind a wire fence and clothed in a neck-to-wrist dress, has opened it at the front to display the triangle of her pubic hair, framed by the reverse triangle formed by her open garment and the line of the tops of her stockings. This was, in fact, the same year that Just Jaeckin filmed Pauline Reage's The Story of O, originally published in 1954; the sexual liberation that followed the arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1961 and culminated in the "summer of love" in 1967 and its aftermath had now moved into a less spontaneous but more sophisticated phase of eroticism - and the plague of AIDS would not appear until early in the 1980s.

Themes of sexual domination and submission are pervasive in Newton's pictures, not only in obvious motifs such as Fashion Model in Chains, Paris (1976) but more subtly in, for example, Woman Being Filmed, Paris (1980). Here a beautiful and luxuriously dressed woman reclines passively in an armchair as a man leans forward to unfasten the front of her dress. But this relatively straightforward evocation of a submissive fantasy is consciously revealed as an artificial scenario, being filmed by the camera, crew and director we see in the background.

This is what makes the interest and what one might call - although the two terms are so often antithetical - the erotic humour of Newton's work, and prevents it from ever being simply vulgar. Woman and Gardener, Lake Como, Italy (1979) is almost breathtaking in the boldness with which he stages the image of a beautiful young woman lifting the skirts of an ample dress before a wiry-armed gardener, like a bird displaying to attract a mate. This not a scene one could imagine literally taking place, and yet it evokes the inadmissible and unrealisable fantasies that an aristocratic girl might entertain about a peasant on her estate.

Upstairs at Maxim's, Paris (1978) takes this sort of thing to the point of camp, also a phenomenon of the time and one already discussed by Susan Sontag in a famous essay, Notes on Camp (1964). In fact, on taking her book down from the shelf, I find she also provides the text for Rheims: "The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of camp sensibility ... here camp draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's own sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

Sontag here touches on something central to the aesthetic of Newton's work, the note of arch irony and ambiguity that sharpens, but in some sense distances, what are essentially heterosexual images. In any case, no image of this kind is more memorable in Newton's oeuvre than Saddle II, Paris (1976), where an elaborate and self-conscious fantasy is played out, this time with a beautiful woman in the role of dominatrix. Armed with a riding crop, she bestrides a saddle set on the back of an armchair in an opulent interior, the whole exquisitely but artificially lit and, like all such fantasies, finely balanced between the erotic and the preposterous, depending on your point of view; a consummate image of the fragile yet compelling dreams that reign over parts of our affective lives.

This was the period in which it became increasingly acceptable to publish such images and display them openly, despite the objections of moralists. Perhaps a more serious reservation, from the opposite point of view, is that erotic images lose their transgressive charge when they are normalised.

But what should make us feel most uneasy is the way the dark glamour and ambiguous eroticism revealed in these works has been exploited for commercial purposes, helping to foster the tawdry and bulimic consumerism of our day.

Helmut Newton and Bettina Rheims
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until May 19