Anthony Blunt

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Anthony Frederick Blunt (born September 26, 1907 in Bournemouth , Hampshire , † March 26, 1983 in London ) was a British art historian and double agent in the service of the British secret service MI5 and the Soviet NKVD .

biography

Anthony Blunt was born in 1907 to an Anglican minister in the diplomatic service in Bournemouth , Hampshire . He spent a large part of his youth in Paris . He received his education at the Marlborough School and studied mathematics at Trinity College , Cambridge until 1930 . There he was under the influence of his friend Guy Burgess the Communists ; both were homosexual and members of the secret society of the " Cambridge Apostles ", which at the time was strongly influenced by Marxism . After graduating, he became a French teacher and in 1932 a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. At Easter 1936 he traveled to Spain, where, like many other British and American intellectuals, he criticized his country's passive attitude towards the danger of fascism in Europe and Asia.

Art historian

Between 1935 and 1940 he published numerous art historical articles in which he expressed himself on the relationship between capitalism, communism and art. He wrote books on Nicolas Poussin , on French and Italian art, and on the drawings of old masters. Blunt was a member of the British Academy of Arts, professor of art history at the Universities of London and Oxford and, in his capacity as director of the Queen's Gallery , the royal collection of paintings, had been formally part of the royal household since 1945. From 1947 to 1974 he was director of the renowned Courtauld Institute in London . He was knighted by the Queen in 1956 for his services. In 1965 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge .

spy

At the same time, however, he worked as a spy for the Soviet Union from the 1930s . Blunt led a double life . Together with friends from his former student debating club - all members of the "ruling class" - he turned to the "working class", which he believed was the only one capable of helping the paralyzing decadence of the pre-war and war generation to bring order and structure to life reform To oppose the working class . From the model of the “ gentleman ” they developed the self-image of the “honest intellectual”, who joins the struggle of the working class in a paternalistic and harmonious way and makes himself available as a didactic avant-garde. Soon Blunt was the "talent spotter" of his Soviet leadership agents.

In 1939 his first attempts to join the British secret service failed. With the outbreak of World War II , he was finally accepted into the MI5 military shielding service through the mediation of his friend Victor Rothschild . It was first considered a security risk until he published a study on aesthetic theory in Italy 1450–1600 in 1940 , in which he apparently broke with his Marxist past.

In MI5 he headed the control of diplomatic mail in Great Britain of accredited neutral states, was responsible for strategic diversionary maneuvers and was promoted to a member of the government's Joint Intelligence Committee , which coordinated the work of the intelligence services and thus gave him insight into the secret service activities of his country via MI5 made possible. Eventually he became a representative of MI5 at the headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. a. dealt with the invasions into Italy and France. For King George VI. Shortly after the end of the war he traveled to Germany, where he had to secretly secure politically compromising letters from members of the British court to German relatives from the 1930s. In agreement with his Soviet command officers, he left MI5 in 1945.

For his Soviet clients, who repeatedly mistrusted the Cambridge graduate, he procured a total of 327 rolls of film and copies of documents classified as secret in 1771. Between 1939 and 1940, Blunt had no contact with his commanding agents for almost a year, because they had fallen out of favor as a result of Stalin's course changes in Moscow and fell victim to the waves of Stalinist purges. After his retirement from MI5, he publicly devoted himself primarily to art, but did not completely give up his contacts. So he warned his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean of their impending arrest and destroyed documents incriminating him under the eyes of MI5 and Scotland Yard . Due to incriminating statements made by Michael Straight, who was recruited by Blunt for the CIA and a Soviet defector, the British counter-espionage put him under such pressure in the early 1960s, with the assurance of impunity and given his position at court, that he finally confessed to his activities until 1945 .

Caused by the book publication of the journalist Andrew Boyle (Climate of Treason) and her anger over the behavior of the English " Oxbridge " upper class Margaret Thatcher broke the public silence of the government and the judiciary that had been going on for almost two decades on November 16, 1979. Only now was Blunt publicly exposed to his friends Kim Philby , Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Donald Maclean as the fourth man of the five-man so-called Cambridge Connection and a Soviet spy. On the same day he was stripped of his knighthood. The British Academy advised him to resign, and his professorial title and license to teach at British universities were revoked.

Books and films based on him

Publications (selection)

  • The French Drawings of Windsor Castle . London 1945
  • François Mansart and the Origins of French Classical Architecture
  • Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration ; German: Art and culture of the Baroque and Rococo. Architecture and decoration . Freiburg 1979
  • Philibert de l'Orme . London 1958
  • Borromini . Cambridge 1979
  • Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1600 (1940); German: Art Theory in Italy 1450-1600 , Munich 1984
  • Art and Architecture in France 1500-1700 (1953; with R. Beresford)
  • Sicilian Baroque (1968); German: Sicilian Baroque . Frankfurt am Main 1972
  • "From Bloomsbury to Marxism" in: Studio International - Journal of Modern Art (1973)
  • Picasso 's ' Guernica '. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1969
  • Picasso, the Formative Years, a Study in his Sources. New York 1962
  • with Walter Friedlaender: The Drawings of Nicolas Poussin . Cat. Rais. London 1974
  • Nicolas Poussin . London 1995

literature

  • Barrie Penrose, Simon Freeman: Conspiracy of silence. The secret life of Anthony Blunt. Grafton Books, Ondon 1986. ISBN 0-246-12200-5
  • Fred Sommer: Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, Gay Spies. In: Journal of Homosexuality 29, 1995, pp. 273-294
  • Miranda Carter: Anthony Blunt. His lives. Macmillan, London 2001. ISBN 0-333-63350-4 Review by Nicholas Penny
  • Peter Kidson: Anthony Frederick Blunt, 1907-1983 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy . tape XIII , 2014, p. 19-39 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fred Sommer: Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, Gay Spies. In: Journal of Homosexuality 29, 1995, pp. 273-294.
  2. ↑ http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/16/newsid_3907000/3907233.stm

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Blunt, Anthony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blunt, Anthony Frederick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British art historian and spy
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Bournemouth , Hampshire
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 1983
Place of death London