"I just had a bellyful and realized I had shot enough nudes to last a lifetime," Newton says, pointing to a gigantic female nude photograph in his Monaco apartment's guest bathroom. "In fact, although I have no idea of the number, I think I photographed too many naked women."

The tanned and trim 75-year-old photographer leads a visitor through his expansive 19th-floor high-rise apartment and office complex and onto an outdoor balcony which features a picture-postcard view of the Monte Carlo Casino, the yacht-filled port and the tiny principality's salmon-pink palace.

It was on this very balcony that Newton once posed one of his trademark power models against the Mediterranean backdrop -- first dressed, then wearing only high heels.

But now the German-born photographer has put all that flesh behind him. No more shots of predatory naked women wearing chains and dog collars. No Amazonian voyeurs or sadomasochistic high-society belles. Those decadent scenarios with million-dollar models posing as midgets and wearing saddles -- images found in books like "Private Property" (Schirmer's Visual Library/Norton, 1990) and his most recent book, "Helmut Newton Illustrated #4" (Schirmer-Mosel, 1995), are a thing of the past. He has even bid adieu to his hard-edged fashion shots. In the new buttoned-up dispensation, the phrase "very Helmut Newton" will no longer be accompanied by knowing leers.

What was behind his decision? Not protests by feminists, or age, or mellowness, Newton says. It was just too much skin.