Anthony Blunt's Poussin

Nicolas Poussin has always been famous. During his lifetime influential champions wrote at length about him.And his letters tell much about his art. Influential within the French Academy, he never fell out of favor and so his reputation never had to be revived. When in the twentieth century long neglected artists like Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca became canonical figures, then there was legitimate uncertainty about whether modern commentaries imposed novel ways of thinking. With Poussin the situation is very different. His champions cannot but acknowledge a long, immensely useful scholarly tradition. Most recent commentators, however, owe a decisive debt to Anthony Blunt (1907–1983) whose claim that Poussin was a highly intellectual artist frequently attracted to esoteric themes was worked out in a number of influential publications. His general way of interpreting Poussin, present, certainly, in the earlier literature, was not developed there in great detail. Blunt took the old cliche , Poussin is the philosopher-painter, and worked it out in detail. Blunt had a highly unusual career, which is relevant to evaluation of his scholarship. A leftist during the 1930s, when he published mediocre Marxist essays, he was recruited as a communist spy. In World War II he served with British intelligence and as a spy for the former USSR passed official secrets to the Russians. Many English intellectuals of his generation had Communist sympathies. Blunt alone acted on his beliefs, in ways that may have affected his scholarship. He thus is the Jacques-Louis David of art historians. Many artists have had passionate political convictions. But David is the only first rate painter who provided a pictorial record of a great revolution in which he played a major role. You cannot understand David’s paintings without examining his political career. Perhaps the same is true about Blunt. And so if he recreated Poussin in his own image, then maybe his influential writings distort our view of that artist. Many art historians have had strongly felt views about social action. T. J. Clark’s view of modernism is melancholy because the failure of communism casts a long shadow on his narrative.