PARIS (AP) ― Yves Saint Laurent empowered women and the same could be said of his contemporary, iconic fashion photographer Helmut Newton, the subject of a retrospective at Paris’ Grand Palais that is not for the prudish.

Several portraits of Saint Laurent, who gave women the male tuxedo, are included in the show, paying tribute to the designer whose empowering, masculine vision of women so influenced Newton.

“He was avant garde. The woman in Helmut Newton’s work is powerful and dominant ― the master in a world without men,’’ said co-curator Jerome Neutres.

The show is a dizzying array of 250 pictures, most provocative photos of models in erotically charged poses, images that for five decades until his death in 2004 graced slick fashion magazines the world over.

The retrospective begins in Paris, where Berlin-born Newton lived in the 1960s working for French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The photos shown here established a particular style marked by stylized scenes, such as models in outer-space, often with fetishistic subtexts. But the women and the men were still clothed.

It was in the mid-1970s that he first became obsessed by the nude ― especially dominatrix representations of women.

His work was defined by stark juxtapositions: models photographed in classically romantic settings, such as Paris’ Ile-Saint-Louis ― standing naked and in traditionally male or dominating positions.

“It was the 1960s when Helmut started working ― at the beginning of the fight for women,’’ said Neutres.

The inclusion, among the naked flesh, of a strictly clothed Margaret Thatcher from 1991 shows how this feminist streak carried through Newton’s career. She was Britain’s first female prime minister, and is widely considered among the most important women of the last century.

From 1980, Newton entered the phase of his “Big Nudes’’ ― a theme he pursued intermittently until 1993.

Two-meter high photos of naked women, standing powerfully in stilettos, tower imposingly over the exhibit’s main room, forcing spectators to stretch their necks upward. It provoked chuckles from visitors. Surprisingly, and with hallmark unpredictability, Newton said this phase was inspired by police identity photos of German terrorists.

The retrospective is an important milestone for the photographer in France ― a country where, after all, he did the lion’s share of his work ― especially for Vogue Paris.

France officially recognized Newton’s artistic impact when Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand made the photographer’s wife June an officer in the Order of Arts and Letters in a ceremony Thursday.

But the exhibit also reveals another side of Newton that’s rarely written about: humor.