A Question of Method: Anthony Blunt and the Practice of Architectural History in Britain (1934-1974)

In the English imagination Anthony Blunt is known as the communist double agent who passed state secrets to the Soviet Union while working for British intelligence services. It is one of the most infamous stories of the Cold War which has produced numerous fictional portrayals and countless non-fictional retellings. Under the weight of all this literature there is comparatively little which looks at Blunt as an art historian and still less at his work on architecture.

The argument presented here is that Blunt’s work as an architectural historian helps us to more comprehensively understand the transformations that took place in architectural history in Britain in the middle of the 20th century because his writing cuts across many of the major methodological changes in the discipline. Initially as an undergraduate he wrote as a doctrinaire formalist. Then as a convinced communist he experimented with an early Marxist history of art. On becoming a colleague of the Warburg Institute he aided the translation of German art historical methods including iconology into British writing on the arts. Finally as Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, he helped to make art and architectural history an academic subject in Britain. Few of Blunt’s contemporaries cut across a comparable nexus of entangled developments. Studying Blunt helps us to grasp with more precision this moment in which the modern architectural historian in Britain was formed.

The chapters which make up this dissertation track each of the major transformations of which Blunt was a part. The first three chapters are on method: Chapter 1 on the spectator and formalism, Chapter 2 on Marxist histories of art and architecture, and Chapter 3 on an iconology of architecture. The last chapter acts as an institutional history of the Courtauld. These developments cannot be easily periodised, one does not strictly follow another so each starts anew at the beginning of Blunt’s historical work. By organising the dissertation thematically in this way the present study tries to capture these developments and the complex arguments within which they were often embroiled, and in doing so, to use Blunt to speak to the wider transformations in the discipline.

The first task of this study has been to show the historical contingencies which underpinned or even determined method in architectural writing. The detailed study of published works sits beside the retrieval from archival sources of the circumstances of various methodological transformations. Blunt’s engagement with a Marxist history of art was propelled by his commitment to communism and the heated political debates of the 1930s. His absorption of the methods of German Kunstgeschichte was intimately bound up with the arrival of the Warburg Institute in London and the politics of exile.

The second task of this work has been to record how the methods presented here were intensely contested. The modern spectator that we see in Chapter I, was replaced by some, derided by others, and challenged by the idea of the historically reconstructed spectator. Chapter 2 will show how early experiments in a Marxist history of art by Frederick Antal which were formative to Blunt, were politically attacked by
conservative historians. While Chapter 4 will try to reconstruct the Courtauld’s efforts to turn art and architectural history into an academic discipline against the backdrop of a sceptical public still enamoured with the more familiar figure of the connoisseur.

Blunt ultimately was a passive figure who borrowed extensively from the writing of his colleagues this allows us to use him as a case study which speaks to the discipline as a whole but it also means that any study of Blunt necessitates an engagement with a wide associated group of scholars. As the dissertation progresses the wider field that Blunt draws us into, shows us that contrary to the historiographic tendency to focus on canonical figures, it takes an enormous collective effort to change the method of a discipline.