Anthony Blunt
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Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907 – 26 March 1983), known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO between 1956 and 1979, was an English art historian, formerly Professor of the History of Art, University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74). He was the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from sometime in the 30s, to the early 50s.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Blunt was born in Bournemouth, where his father was a vicar. 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, and later read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, but he switched to Modern Languages after his first year, 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. He was also a homosexual.
[edit] Espionage
After visiting Russia in 1933, Blunt was recruited in 1934 by the NKVD (forerunner of 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 messages to the Soviet Union.
[edit] Postwar Life
After the war he became director (1947-1974) of the Courtauld Institute of Art. His students there included Brian Sewell and Nicholas Serota.
In 1945 Blunt became Surveyor of the King's Pictures, and retained the post 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.[1]
In 1963 MI5 learned of his espionage from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had recruited. Blunt confessed to MI5 on 23 April 1964, but his spying career remained an official secret until he was publicly named by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He was promptly stripped of his knighthood, and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College. According to MI5 papers released in 2002, that 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.
He was the brother of writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and of numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt.
[edit] Blunt in fiction
A Question of Attribution was a play written by Alan Bennett about Blunt in the weeks before his public exposure as a spy, and his relationship with the Queen. 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" a 1985 film staring Ian Richardson, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Williams, Rosie Kerslake ; a complex excursion into 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.
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 Joe Losey, a film director fleeing McCarthyism.
[edit] Publications
- A. Blunt, François Mansart and the Origins of French Classical Architecture.
- A. Blunt, Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration.
- A. Blunt, Borromini.
- R. Beresford and A. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, 1953.
- Sicilian Baroque, 1968.
- A. Blunt, "Roman Baroque Architecture: the Other Side of the Medal," Art history, no. 1, 1980, pp. 61-80 (includes bibliographical references).
- A. Blunt, "Rubens and architecture," Burlington magazine, 1977, 894, pp. 609-621.
- Anthony Blunt, Picasso's Guernica, Oxford University Press, 1969.
- Blunt, Anthony, Nicolas Poussin. Pallas Athene publishing, London, 1995
[edit] 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, 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.
[edit] See also
| Preceded by Kenneth Clark |
Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures 1945–1973 |
Succeeded by Oliver Millar |
[edit] External links
[edit] Further reading
- Nigel West, Seven Spies Who Changed the World. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991 (hard cover). London: Mandarin, 1992 (paperback).
Categories: Communist Party of Great Britain members | English art historians | English curators | English architecture writers | Academics of the Courtauld Institute of Art | Soviet spies | Cold War spies | English communists | Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge | Old Marlburians | People from Bournemouth | LGBT people from England | 1907 births | 1983 deaths
