The spring weather brought everyone out and we had a very busy start to May with dinners for Lucy and Valerie. Luzius Martin and Udo Breger arrived in London on the 5th and we had our usual dinners: one in a restaurant and one here the following day, always accompanied by Terry Wilson, who lives here. On the 8th we all had lunch with Tom Neurath at the Palestinian restaurant beneath his office on Golborne Road in Notting Hill. Tom was not looking at all well. He had lost considerable weight and had grey skin. Nonetheless, he spoke enthusiastically about his collection of Samuel Beckett first editions and asked me to have Ed Maggs send him the list of Beckett items that I knew that they were about to send to auction. His numerous cancer treatments had all failed and though they were trying a few experimental procedures he knew that he was dying. Consequently, he taken up smoking pot and cigarettes again and, certainly a few months before, was drinking a little schnapps again. We had an almost tearful hug when we all departed. We knew it was unlikely that we would see each other again.  

I kept up on the art world: the next day Marsha Rowe and I attended the opening of the refurbished Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery. Architecturally it seems to be a great improvement, but they still light the pictures from high above, throwing big black shadows from their frames across the tops of many of them, distorting the size ratio, obscuring detail, and very much damaging the viewers’ enjoyment. Why they can’t lower the lighting gantries by 10 meters or so is beyond me. Any rock ‘n’ roll lighting roadie could do it for them and it wouldn’t even cost very much to do. [I can recommend some.] As it is, the hang is a disgrace. In some cases, the shadow obscures the top half of a figure’s head or puts a strong wavy line across the top of the picture, distorting the composition. Typical of Britain, I’m afraid. Here’s Raphael’s Garvagh Madonna [1510]; Pontormo’s Joseph’s Brothers Beg For Help [1515] and his Joseph Sold to Potifer with their thick shadows.

My other art day was to have a pleasant lunch with Andrew Wilson and art dealer Anthony Reynolds at the Academy Club which is always a relaxing yet invigorating place at lunchtimes. Of course in the evenings the members can sometimes become boisterous as you can see. 

Theo, Mina and I flew to France on the 14th where Rosemary’s sister Jackie had assembled eight of her family members for a reunion. They all came to dinner of course, but were staying about an hour’s drive away so I didn’t see much of them. Theo joined them for one night and they all had a good time on the coast. Theo and Mina in France.

Back in town I resumed the usual round of dinners and visits to exhibitions as befits an elderly man in London: dinner with Lucy, show and a dinner with Jill – the Hiroshige show at the British Museum. I enjoyed it but was disturbed by the fact that all the women looked the same: same face, same blank expression, even if he was depicting a crowd of a dozen or more, they were all clones. It revealed a lot about the situation of women in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan, they were virtually inviable. But his colour and his un-western perspective is wonderful. They are prints, and his publishers have sometimes substituted different colour backgrounds which completely change the reading of the composition, it’s all fascinating.) 

Tom Neurath died on Saturday 14th June. I had known him since 1965; 60 years. We were introduced by Ian Sommerville who first became his friend in 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris where they both lived. Tom had always been a supporter of Ian and his work and collected his infinity-grid pictures. He was also a friend of Hoppy, who I shared a flat with in the mid-sixties, so I quickly got to known him. We were not close, but over the years we did quite a few things together. We once took the Thames & Hudson Rolls Royce down to Deal, on the coast, to meet Harold Chapman whose book of photographs, The Beat Hotel, [1984] was out of print. Tom was considering re-issuing it. The problem was that the reproductions in the original edition were not good enough to use for a reprint, so we were going down to hopefully collect the original prints or inspect his negatives to find possible substitutes or additions for an enlarged edition. Of course Harold hadn’t prepared anything. He finally found a box with a few curled-up prints but couldn’t find any contact sheets or anything that would have been of use. He pontificated about this and that. Claire produced a bottle of whiskey and the afternoon drifted by, but the visit was a waste of time. Either Harold didn’t want to really re-issue the book, or his dementia had already set in, and we hadn’t realised. 

Another time, more amusing, was when Peter Weibel, the director of ZKM in Karlsruhe, invited Tom and I to give a talk on ‘Swinging London’. A less likely subject for Tom to speak on would have been hard to find as he had not been a part of that scene at all. But it sounded like a fun project, so we flew out and sat in conversation, in English, before a packed auditorium. I don’t recall anyone leaving so I think they were entertained. I will miss him.