It’s a while since I’ve been to the Café Einstein, a relic, but in some ways an artificial one, of old Berlin, designed in 1878 as a neo-renaissance villa for Gustav Rossmann, the owner of a sewing machine factory, turned into a Weimar gambling club, busted by the Nazis, apparently bought by Goebbels for his mistress, and then, once more, turned into an illegal casino for the SS. It was turned into a Viennese coffee house in 1978, its centenary, in what was West Berlin, close to the wall and a centre for DAAD artists in the mid-1980s:-

The second leg of my Blain|Southern induction programme has been to visit its gallery in Berlin, an old printworks just down the road from the Neue Nationalgalerie, formerly occupied by Der Tagesspiegel, converted into a grand, industrial gallery space by David Adjaye and now showing work by Mat Collishaw (in conversation tomorrow):-

We went to see The Favourite, a curious and fantastical, updated dramatization of the historical moment when Sarah Churchill’s intense psychological relationship with Queen Anne was supplanted by that of Abigail Hill and the Tories. So how historical was it ? In some ways, very, in that it represented the manoeuvres in Queen Anne’s court, so far as I know, quite accurately (historical advisor: Dr. Hannah Greig), but in most ways, not at all, owing more to the extreme and ostentatious fictionalisation of The Draughtsman’s Contract than it did to Jonathan Swift and Lord Macaulay. But not the less enjoyable for all that, with a brilliant, childish and manipulative performance by Olivia Colman as Queen Anne. The house is Hatfield, but looked much bigger than it does in reality, and maybe too Jacobean for the court of Queen Anne.

I went to the first of a series of Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery by Tim Barringer, the Paul Mellon Professor at Yale, on the subject of Global Landscape in the Age of Empire. It was a highly intelligent and thoughtful exposition of the phenomenon of panoramas, which were extremely fashionable in the late eighteenth centuries, patented by George Barker and shown to dramatic effect in special installations in the streets off Leicester Square: sensational use of art to show off different corners of the globe. It’s a technology equivalent to the Imax cinema – strong on visual impact. He was right to end with Lisa Reihana’s epic video installation in the Oceania exhibition, which used a traditional technology of panoramas to good, but deliberately subversive, effect.

As we move into the 500th. anniversary of Leonardo’s death on 2 May 1519 at the château of Amboise, according to Vasari, in the arms of the French king, I was asked to appear on the Today programme in connection with the objections of an Italian junior minister of culture, Lucia Borgonzoni, to the fact that by far the biggest single exhibition is being held not in Italy, but at the Louvre in Paris, which has the largest and most important holding of Leonardo’s paintings. She has discouraged Italian museums from lending to the exhibition. In fact, only Parma is lending, as the Uffizi had already turned down the request on grounds of condition. And Italy is itself doing multiple exhibitions – in Milan, in Florence at the Galileo Museum, and in Turin. So, we can surely celebrate Leonardo as an uomo universale, not a subject of nationalist ambitions.

I have tried to insulate myself from worrying too much on a day-to-day basis about the consequences of Brexit; but, now that we are into the New Year and have less than three months before we are compelled (and have volunteered) to leave the EU, I for the first time feel a deep sense of foreboding. Every option seems equally implausible: the Deal which is on the table nobody seems to support, not even the Cabinet itself; a second Referendum feels increasingly unlikely – too disruptive and merely re-opening existing wounds; so, we increasingly face the likelihood of leaving the EU with No Deal, with all the short-term consequences that will entail, including problems in food and medical supplies, leading to the possibility of civil disorder. No wonder the Prime Minister looks ever more anxious and unconfident. But maybe someone can tell me otherwise.

It’s our Ruby Wedding. We were married forty years ago today in Wellesbourne Church in Warwickshire. It was icy cold and had snowed, so many people didn’t make it to the ceremony. We all look cold in the black-and-white photographs and I look thin. We went for a three day honeymoon in the Harp Inn in Old Radnor, which was run by the Landmark Trust. It’s a long time ago.

We went to the Lorenzo Lotto Portraits exhibition downstairs in the basement of the National Gallery – free and mercifully uncrowded, whereas the upstairs galleries (and the National Dining Rooms) were packed.

He comes across as an unexpectedly uneven artist- some wonderful work, psychologically penetrating, including major works from the National Gallery’s own collection, Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his son, Niccolò, painted not long after Lotto had moved to Bergamo, the Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia, and Andrea Odoni from the Royal Collection; also, a wonderful late Lotto from the National Gallery of Canada, Portrait of a Man with a Felt Hat, only acquired in 1998. But I found it hard to get a sense of his career as a whole, flitting across northern Italy, apparently increasingly depressed, ending his career as a lay brother in Loreto.

One of the views of the Estuary that I admired by John Wonnacott was his view through the window of the station at Chalkwell:-

http://johnwonnacott.co.uk/?id=85

This is how the view looked as I left:-

I spent most of the day with John Wonnacott, a painter I much admire and whose landscape paintings are going to be the subject of an exhibition at the Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, opening on May 4th.

This is him in his studio (it looks like one of his paintings because he uses wide angle perspective and often paints the view out to sea):-

This is a recent Self-portrait:-

And an older Self-portrait:-

This is the view out to sea:-

This is lunch because he thinks my blog is obsessed by food:-

And this is a painting which I like and he doesn’t which I hope he’ll include in the exhibition:-