Watching Alan Bennett’s television play ‘A Question of Attribution’, one is unfortunately reminded that the legacy of Anthony Blunt is almost entirely of the traitorous fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring whose politically motivated exposure in 1979 was, it seems, solely to provide the Thatcher government with a whipping boy. That his exposure also greatly embarrassed the crown, working as he had been as surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, and knighted in the process, Thatcher’s short term goal of providing transparency in government further distanced her from the queen, with whom she had at the best of times a chilly relationship.
Occluded in all this, though, is the extraordinary art historian that Blunt was. If one doesn’t know anything else, one should know that Blunt was almost entirely responsible for a rescue and consequent recognition of the baroque as an important epoch, and elevating Poussin and Borromini to canonical status within the period.
Moreover, before and during his tenancy as director of the Courtauld Institute, he moved the discipline from a crudely fashioned empiricism into the contextual analysis that forms the backbone of not only modern art historical consideration, but virtually all aspects of study involving material culture. With all that, he was serious about scholarship, and had no time for what is politely termed ‘appreciationism.’ A painting may say something to a body, but that aesthetic interchange, unless one is looking just to decorate the walls, is largely irrelevant. One can’t possibly know entirely how a picture was perceived within its contemporaneous context, but it is that context, albeit only partly apprehended, that is crucial to achieving the all important site of meaning.
Why it was that Blunt decided to spy for the Soviets is impossible to say. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’, that time being the era of economic and political ferment of the mid 1930’s, seems the oft given but inadequate response to what remains still an open question. In her excellent recent biography of Blunt, Miranda Carter tries to give some indication of Blunt’s Marxist leanings, concluding something pervasive in Blunt’s point of view that also influenced his critical analysis of paintings. However, Blunt’s own identification of a particular painting as either aristocratic, bourgeois, or proletarian, while indicative of class division, is hardly conclusive of class struggle.
My own career in art history post dates that of Blunt, but fortunately, it has overlapped and been influenced by very many who knew and were taught by him. The opinions are, unanimously, positive nearly hagiographic ones, and mercifully apolitical, of a scholar whose scholarship was rigorous and impeccable, whose lectures and seminars were a joy to attend, and whose attention to students was sincere and conscientious.