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Anthony Blunt
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Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907, Bournemouth, Hampshire – 26 March 1983, Westminster, London), known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO between 1956 and 1979, was a British spy, art historian, formerly Professor of the History of Art, University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74).
Blunt was an acclaimed art critic and the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five; a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to the early 1950s.
t was born in Bournemouth, the third and youngest son of a vicar, the Revd (Arthur) Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870–1929) and his wife, Hilda Violet (1880–1969), daughter of Henry Master of the Madras civil service.
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Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907, Bournemouth, Hampshire – 26 March 1983, Westminster, London), known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO between 1956 and 1979, was a British spy, art historian, formerly Professor of the History of Art, University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74).
Blunt was an acclaimed art critic and the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five; a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to the early 1950s.
Biography
Early life
Blunt was born in Bournemouth, the third and youngest son of a vicar, the Revd (Arthur) Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870–1929) and his wife, Hilda Violet (1880–1969), daughter of Henry Master of the Madras civil service. He was the brother of writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and of numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt, and the grandnephew of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
He was educated at Marlborough College, where he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice (whose unfinished autobiography The Strings are False contains numerous references to Blunt), John Betjeman and Graham Shepard. He later read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and earned his first degree in that subject. But he switched to Modern Languages, eventually graduating in 1930, to become a teacher of French. He became a Fellow of the college in 1932, and in 1965 was Slade Professor of Fine Art in Cambridge. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society which at that time was Marxist, formed from members of Cambridge University.
Espionage
After visiting the Soviet Union in 1933, Blunt was recruited in 1934 by the NKVD (later absorbed by the KGB). A committed Marxist, Blunt was instrumental in recruiting Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. He joined the British Army in 1939 and in 1940 was recruited to MI5, the military intelligence department. He passed on ULTRA intelligence from decrypted Enigma intercepts to the Soviet Union. He reached the rank of major.
As World War II was ending, Blunt successfully undertook a special mission to the defeated Germany on behalf of the British Royal Family, to recover incriminating letters written by the Duke of Windsor to Adolf Hitler. The mission may have also recovered the so-called 'Vicky Letters', between Queen Victoria and some of her German relatives.
Later life
After the war Blunt became director (1947-1974) of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His students there included Brian Sewell, Ron Bloore and Nicholas Serota. He had been teaching at the Courtauld since shortly before World War II.
In 1945 Blunt became Surveyor of the King's Pictures, continuing under Queen Elizabeth II, for which work he was knighted as a KCVO in 1956. He retained the post until 1972. He was particularly knowledgeable on the works of Nicolas Poussin. Interested in architecture, he attended a summer school in Sicily in 1965; this led to a deep interest in Sicilian architecture, and in 1968 he wrote the only authoritative and in-depth book on Sicilian Baroque.
Blunt is frequently spoken of as a distant relative of Queen Mary (Mary of Teck) – generally Prince Michael of Hesse is given as their common cousin – however, the exact lineage is never produced. He was, however, demonstrably a cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the late Queen Mother, through his mother, Hilda V. Master, daughter of John Henry Master, son of Frances Mary Smith, sister of Oswald Smith, father of Frances Dora Smith, mother of Claude George Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, father of Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, making Blunt and the Queen Mother third cousins, by common descent from George Smith and his wife Frances Mary Mosley.
Following the May, 1951 defection of fellow spies Guy Burgess and Donald Duart Maclean to the Soviet Union, Blunt came under suspicion as well. He had been a close, longtime friend of Burgess. Maclean was in imminent danger of being unmasked as a spy by decryptions from VENONA. Blunt was interrogated by MI5 in 1952, but gave little, if anything, away.
In January 1964 Arthur Martin from MI5 interviewed Michael Straight (later owner and editor of The New Republic and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), an American who had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and who had become friends there with Blunt, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Straight claimed that Blunt had tried to recruit him to become a Soviet spy. Arthur Martin and Jim Skardon had interviewed Blunt eleven times since 1951 but Blunt never sang. Martin, now armed with Straight's story, went to see Blunt again and this time Blunt made a confession. Queen Elizabeth II was informed shortly thereafter.He admitted to being a Soviet agent and named John Cairncross, Peter Ashby, Brian Symon and Leo Long as spies he had recruited. But his spying career remained an official secret in return for his full confession. Martin himself was disappointed when it was discovered that Roger Hollis and Attorney-General Sir John Hobson decided not to put Anthony Blunt on trial. He again argued that there was still a Soviet spy working at the centre of MI5 but Hollis thought Martin's suggestion was highly damaging to the organization and ordered Martin to be suspended from duty.
Blunt's role as a Soviet agent was exposed – albeit under a false name – in Andrew Boyle's book, Climate of Treason in 1979 and he was publicly named by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the same year. Queen Elizabeth II stripped Blunt of his knighthood, and he was removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College. Blunt is supposed to have fled the country after the public revelation and lived somewhere in southern Europe. However, he returned to London but may not have fully realized the strength of feeling that had been whipped up against him until one day in February 1980, when he tried to see a film in Notting Hill, he was booed out of the cinema. That same month, his partner since 1953, John Gaskin, threw himself from a sixth-floor balcony but survived. Blunt was eventually to die at his home in London.
In October 2001, the BBC reported that an autobiographical memoir written by Blunt during 1979–83 describing his life and his time as a spy, through to his exposure by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1979, was being held in the British Library. It is due to be released 30 years after Blunt's death, in 2013.
According to MI5 papers released in 2002, the agency had been told by the writer Moura Budberg in 1950 that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party, but the information was ignored.
Career as an art historian
All throughout his espionage, Anthony Blunt was living an extremely fruitful career as a highly respected art historian. In 1940, most of his fellowship dissertation was published under the title of Artistic Theories in Italy, 1450-1600. In 1945, he was given the esteemed position of Surveyor of the King’s, and later the Queen’s, Pictures, one of the largest private collections in the world. He held the position for 27 years, and was vital in the expansion and cataloguing of the Queen’s Gallery, which opened in 1962.
A few years later, in 1947, Blunt became the Director of the Courtauld Institute, and Professor of History of Art at the University of London. During his 27 years at the Courtauld Institute, Blunt was respected as a dedicated teacher, an enormously kind superior to his staff, and an invaluable resource for changing the Institute for the better. He fought for more teachers, more funding, more space, and was central in acquiring outstanding collections for the Galleries.
He had many notable students, including the art historian John White.
During his tenure, he lived in a furnished apartment at the Courtauld.
Blunt is often credited for making the Courtauld what it is today, for pioneering art history in Britain, and for training the next generation of British art historians. In fact, according to one of Blunt’s biographers, Miranda Carter, several of his former students have been highly influenced by his teachings, including Neil Macgregor, the former editor for the Burlington magazine, former director of the National Gallery and the current director for the British Museum.
Other students who have been influenced by Anthony Blunt include Sir Alan Bowness (who ran the Tate Gallery), John Golding (who wrote the first major book on Cubism), Reyner Banham (an influential architectural historian), John Shearman (the ‘world expert’ on Mannerism and the former Chair of the Art History Department at Harvard University), Melvin Day(former Director of National Art Gallery of New Zealand and Government Art Historian for New Zealand ), Christopher Newall (an expert on the Pre-Raphaelites), Michael Jaffe (an expert on Rubens), Michael Mahoney (former Curator of European Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and former Chair of the Art History Department at Trinity College, Hartford), Brian Sewell (an art critic for the Evening Standard), Lee Johnson (an expert on Eugène Delacroix),and Anita Brookner (an art historian and novelist).
In 1953, Blunt published his book Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, and three years later was knighted by the British Government for his work for MI5. Among his many accomplishments, Blunt also received a series of honorary fellowships, became the National Trust picture advisor, put on exhibitions at the Royal Academy, edited and wrote numerous books and articles, and sat on every influential art committee.
After Thatcher announced Blunt’s espionage, he continued his art historical work by writing and publishing a Guide to Baroque Rome (1982) and completing a manuscript (apparently lost by the publisher after they sent it to a German art historian) on the architecture of Pietro da Cortona.
Blunt also published several books on the art of regions which had been generally neglected, including his book Sicilian Baroque. This publication is admittedly limited, and is intended as only a survey of the architecture of Sicily. Blunt comments in his preface that a “proper history of this particular branch of Baroque architecture” could not be completed as much research is needed to be done in “the archives of the churches, the religious houses and the old families in the island.” Despite his limited resources, Blunt broke new ground in this area, a subject still often neglected in today’s art history.
He has also been said to have “played a central role in restoring the reputation of the French painter Nicolas Poussin,” of whom he had written numerous books and articles. He served as curator for a landmark exhibition of Poussin at the Louvre in 1960, which was an enormous success. He did not, however, limit his research in the areas of Italian art and French art, but also wrote on topics as diverse as William Blake, Pablo Picasso, the Galleries of England, Scotland, and Wales. He also catalogued the French drawings (1945), G. B. Castiglione and Stefano della Bella drawings (1954) Roman drawings (with H. L. Cooke, 1960) and Venetian (with Edward Croft Murray, 1957) drawings in the collection of the Queen, as well as a supplement of Addenda and Corrigenda to the Italian catalogues (in E. Schilling's German Drawings).
Many of his ground-breaking publications are still seen today by scholars as integral to the study of art history. His method of writing is lucid, and is based largely on art and architecture in context of their place in history. In his book Art and Architecture in France, for example, he begins each section with a brief depiction of the social, political and/or religious contexts in which works of art and art movements are emerging. And in Blunt’s Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600, he clearly explains the motivational circumstances involved in the transitions between the High Renaissance and Mannerism. His ground-breaking work and logical method to art history have served as resources for many scholars, including Todd P. Olson and John Beldon Scott.
Portrayals in popular culture
A Question of Attribution is a play written by Alan Bennett about Blunt, covering the weeks before his public exposure as a spy, and his relationship with Queen Elizabeth II. After a successful run in London's West End, it was made into a television play directed by John Schlesinger and starring James Fox, Prunella Scales and Geoffrey Palmer. It was aired on the BBC in 1991. This play was seen as a companion to Bennett's 1983 television play about Guy Burgess, An Englishman Abroad.
Blunt: The Fourth Man is a 1985 film starring Ian Richardson, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Williams, and Rosie Kerslake, covering the events of 1951 when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean went missing.
The Untouchable, a 1997 novel by John Banville, is a roman à clef based largely on the life and character of Anthony Blunt; the novel's protagonist, Victor Maskell, is a loosely disguised Blunt, although some elements of the character are based on Louis MacNeice.
A Friendship of Convenience: Being a Discourse on Poussin's "Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake", is a 1997 novel by Rufus Gunn set in 1956 in which Blunt, then Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, encounters Joseph Losey, a film director fleeing McCarthyism.
Cambridge Spies is a 2003 four-part BBC television drama concerning the lives of the Cambridge Five from 1934 to the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the Soviet Union.
Publications
A Festschrift Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art presented to Anthony Blunt on his 60th Birthday, Phaidon 1967 (introduction by Ellis Waterhouse) contains a full list of his writings up to 1966.
Major works include:
- Anthony Blunt, François Mansart and the Origins of French Classical Architecture, 1941.
- Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, 1953 and many subsequent editions.
- Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin. A Critical Catalogue, Phaidon 1966
- Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, Phaidon 1967 (new edition Pallas Athene publishing, London, 1995).
- Anthony Blunt, Sicilian Baroque, 1968 (ed. it. Milano 1968; Milano 1986).
- Anthony Blunt, Picasso's Guernica, Oxford University Press, 1969.
- Anthony Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture, London 1975 (ed. it. Milano 2006).
- Anthony Blunt, Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration, 1978.
- Anthony Blunt, Borromini, 1979 (ed. it. Roma-Bari 1983).
- Anthony Blunt, L'occhio e la storia. Scritti di critica d'arte (1936-1938), a cura di Antonello Negri, Udine 1999.
Important articles after 1966:
- Anthony Blunt, "Rubens and architecture," Burlington Magazine, 1977, 894, pp. 609-621.
- Anthony Blunt, "Roman Baroque Architecture: the Other Side of the Medal," Art history, no. 1, 1980, pp. 61-80 (includes bibliographical references).
Bibliography
- John Banville, The Untouchable (novel), 1997.
- Alan Bennett, A Question of Attribution (first theatre performance as the second part of a double-bill, with An Englishman Abroad about Guy Burgess as the first part, London, 1988; broadcast as television play, 1991; both plays published in one volume as Single Spies, London, Faber, 1989, ISBN 0-571-14105-6.
- Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason, 1979.
- Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Pan (UK), ISBN 0-330-36766-8.
- John Costello (novelist), Mask Of Treachery (non-fiction), London, Collins, 1988, ISBN 0-688-04483-2.
- Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False, London, Faber, 1965, reissued 1996, ISBN 0-571-11832-1.
- Penrose, Barrie, & Freeman, Simon, "Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt," New York, 1987.
- Michael Straight. After Long Silence: the Man Who Exposed Anthony Blunt Tells for the First Time the Story of the Cambridge Spy Network from the Inside, London, Collins, 1983, ISBN 0-00-217001-9.
- Peter Wright. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, Toronto 1987, Stoddart Publishers.
- Michael Kitson. "Blunt, Anthony Frederick (1907-1983)," rev. Miranda Carter, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP,2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.
- "Blunt, Anthony." Dictionary of Art Historians. http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/blunta.htm.
- "Anthony Blunt and the Courtauld Institute." The Burlington Magazine,116, no. 858 (Sept. 1974):501.*André Chastel, Anthony Blunt, art historian (1907-1983), in "The Burlington Magazine", CXXV, 966, september 1983, pp. 546-547.
- Cesare De Seta, Anthony Blunt, in Viale Belle Arti. Maestri e amici, Milano 1991, pp. 111-138.
- Andrea Gatti, La critica della ragione. sulla teoria dell'arte di Anthony Blunt, in "Miscellanea Marciana", XVII, 2002, pp. 193-205.
- Fulvio Lenzo, Napoli e l'architettura italiana ed europea negli studi di Anthony Blunt, in Anthony Blunt, Architettura barocca e rococò a Napoli, ed. it. a cura di Fulvio Lenzo, Milano 2006, pp.7-15.
See also
Further reading
- Anthony Blunt by Michael Kitson in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)
- Nigel West, Seven Spies Who Changed the World. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991 (hard cover). London: Mandarin, 1992 (paperback).
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