Anthony Blunt's Picasso

by CHRISTOPHER GREEN, CourtauldInstitute

ofArt,London

Anthony blunt never much liked Surrealism. When,

however, he reviewed the London International Surrealist
exhibition of 1936, he accepted the fact that the English of a
certain sort seemed to relish Surrealism in surprising quanti
- a
ties, which gave him an idea wicked idea. Perhaps, he
suggested, an explanation could be found in 'the repressive
education and way of living characteristic of the English.
After all the psychological confusions created in the average
Englishman by a public school education are such that he
may well find in front of a Superrealist painting that kind of
sexual liberty and excitement which suits him. Itmay be that
after a life of good, clean fun the sadism of Soft Construction
. . .
with boiled apricots by Dal? provides a healthy escape.'1
Blunt's wicked idea was a travelling exhibition of Surrealism
especially for the English public schools: Surrealism as therapy
for the great repressed of Winchester, Eton, Harrow and
Marlborough.
By 1936 Blunt was in no doubt that Picasso was a Sur
realist, a view underlined by the presence of Picasso's work in
the International Surrealist exhibition alongside that of Dal?.
But a little over a decade before, when Blunt was himself
a sixteen-year-old malcontent atMarlborough, Picasso had
been one of his chosen weapons against the 'good, clean fun'
-
of his public school education not, however, Picasso the
Surrealist, but Picasso the Cubist with 'classical' leanings: the
Picasso of the well-built still fifes and the traditionalising
21. Large
nudes and portraits of the early 1920s (Fig.21), the Picasso of
bather,by
the 'Call to Order' in the aftermath of the FirstWorld War. Pablo Picasso.
From his own reminiscences of the early 1970s and from 1921. 180 by
98 cm.
Miranda Carter's biography, we have been introduced to a
(Mus?e de
teenage Blunt, led on by his elder brotherWilfred, who knew l'Orangerie,
this disciplinarian Picasso well, and knew him at first hand in Paris).

his Parisian context.2 By 1924, at the age of sixteen, he had

already developed the habit of keeping abreast with the show
ings of Picasso, the Cubists and the Purists at the galleries in Gleizes. In combination, the theories and the paintings
and around rue la Bo?tie. As he came to know the critical (especially Picasso's) were certainly enough to outrage Marl
theories generated by, above all,Roger Fry and Clive Bell in borough.
thewake of the London Post-Impressionist exhibitions (1910 Yet, from the evidence of what the young Blunt actually
and 1912), he put those theories to the test on the paintings thought about Cubism and Picasso in 1924, it is hard, from
he saw in Paul and L?once Rosenberg's galleries in Paris, and such a distance, to see his stance as one of provocation. Blunt's
did so, moreover, with the added awareness of some of the views at that moment can be discerned from a couple of
latest writings on Picasso and Cubism by, among others, articles in the littlemagazine that he and his anti-good-clean
Maurice Raynal, Jean Cocteau, Waldemar George and Albert fun aesthete friends produced atMarlborough in 1924, The

This article is an edited and abridged version of a lecture delivered in February 2004 (November 1973), pp. 164-68; see alsoM. Carter: Anthony Blunt. His Lives, London
in the series 'Being Blunt' at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 2001.
1 A. Blunt: 3 A. Blunt: 'Some Aspects ofModern Art', The Heretick 1 (March 1924), pp.io-n;
'Superrealism in London', The Spectator (19th June 1936), p. 116. This
particular work by Dali was, in fact, called Soft constructionwith boiled beans, and was and idem: 'Art and Morality', ibid. 2 (June 1924), p.99. The handwritten manuscript

actually shown not in the International Surrealist exhibition but in a Dal? exhibition of Blunt's lecture 'Picasso and Cubism' is in theA. Blunt papers, Courtauld Institute
timed to coincide with it held at the Alex Reid and Lefevre Gallery, London, from of Art, London.
2nd June to 18thJuly 1936 (someone evidendy had misheard 'haricots'as 'abricots').Soft 4 Blunt
(March 1924), op. at. (note 3), p.n.
with boiled beans (Premonition of civilwar), 1936, is now in the Philadelphia
construction 5 Blunt lecture cited at note 3 above.
6 Ibid.
Museum ofArt. In the 1930s, 'Superrealism' was Blunt's habitual term for Surrealism.
2 See A. Blunt: 'From toMarxism', Studio International 186, no.960 7 'Blinkers. A Point of View', The Heretick 1 (March 1924), pp.7-8.
Bloomsbury 'Diogenes':

20 JANUARY 2OO5 CXLVII THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE

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 ANTHONY BLUNT'S PICASSO

Heretick, with its anti-games flavour (Fig. 22), and from the never actually elucidates what
direction of abstraction'.5 He
handwritten manuscript of a lecture delivered at the end of the 'problems of form' might be, but he considers them as
the same year to the art club Blunt founded there, 'The being addressed not only by Picasso the Cubist but also by
Anonymous Society' (Fig.23).3 the traditionalist Picasso of the early 1920s. Cubism, he says,
It is difficult in reading these texts to keep in mind that echoing Cocteau among others, has been for Picasso a

theywere written by a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. They are training which has allowed him to turn away 'from themost
astonishingly mature. The tone is measured and cool, the abstract art that the world has ever seen ... to the oppo
voice one of confident authority rather than disruptive site extreme ...
a complete mastery of the
[to achieve]
rebellion. It is the dispassionate voice Anthony Blunt kept problems of form, such as has never been shown before by
his career as a writer on art. His are artist'.6
throughout arguments any
-
founded on thewritings of both Fry and Bell, but he is already Itwassurely the surface sheen of Blunt's logic its very
reason - so
confident enough in his firstHeretick piece to doubt Bell's appeal to that would have made it provocative
unqualified belief in 'significant form'. 'The representative to, above all, his art teacher, Christopher Hughes, atMarl
arts', he tells his readers, arouse 'something fuller and deeper borough. For a believer in Burne-Jones, itmust have been
on the emotional level than that aroused by purely abstract particularly infuriating to find this precocious boy telling him
? ?
works of art such as vases, carpets
or mere decorations.'4 that the logical and thus inevitable future of European
While he might confess that he cannot say what are the painting had been determined by C?zanne, Picasso and
causes of this 'additional' emotional charge, he does not hesi Cubism. Indeed, the declared strategy of The Heretick was to
tate to tell his captive boarding-school readership what to challenge the unthinking prejudices thatwent with organised
think. At the same time, there is a cogency in all the texts to sport and the Officers Training Corps by displays not only of
the wayhe constructs his arguments that shows an explicit aesthetic sensibility but also of reasoned argument. 'The pub
commitment to reason, one that ismanifesdy in tune with the lic schools send into the world', declared one Heretick con
rational humanist principles of Bloomsbury, especially those tributor under the pen-name 'Diogenes', 'men obsessed with
ofRoger Fry. It drives his central argument in favour of both the idea of struggle and competition, who accept stupidly the
Picasso and Cubism in the 1920s, just as his distaste for the imbecile welter of the world because they are unable to
irrational was to fuel his attacks on Picasso and Surrealism in analyse its realities, having their ideas founded upon prejudice
1936. Cubism, Blunt says in his Picasso lecture, is 'the logical rather than upon reason.'7 The Cubist and 'classical' Picasso
end towhich painting must tend eventually', and ifC?zanne whom Blunt deployed in the name of reason fitted the
is its starting-point, then 'Picasso is really a logical explanation project of his Heretick friends perfecdy. Very littlewas needed
[of] and development from him'. He acknowledges Picasso's by an 'intellectual aesthete' to cause provocation at Marl

impulsiveness, but he presents Picasso the Cubist as 'logically' borough in 1924. Blunt later recalled how intensely he could
working out what he calls 'the problems of form' 'in the irritate his dormitory just by walking up and down reading

22. Cover of The

Heretick,Marlborough
College, 1924.

The Heretick tk?M t-Aiifc-.-iLafl

.fo*.?*t&*4;;
C^&hJtf,

ait .r?*#t.
f?n* fuSS^M.
.W?^.?i?fci,. Jta^
N^f w? ^Aj); (
Tki^u tip??*, m?

*?*Vfc ftK4?
tfV**y OLfi?C..Q/L?uu**4.

u**?.*- **.
Ah.fi?* w
AC?v./>&^?^

Ao? -c?Xs ?-VfcTC...:..?.?\*&t**? ,

*j?; u^*^?:.^^...:.**J.:;...Ju*<^s3|^|l

23. Manuscript page

from Anthony Blunt's
paper given to
Marlborough Col
lege's 'Anonymous
Upon Philistia will I triumph'1 Society', 1924.
(A. Blunt papers,
Courtauld Institute of
Art, London).

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE CXLVII JANUARY 2005 27

ANTHONY BLUNT'S PICASSO

aloud from Gertrude Stein.8 Itwas

left to another contributor,
the future Oxford historian John Bowie, to set down what
in a
might have been really sensational rebellious school mag
azine: an article, he suggested, by a 'tame Bolshevik', morbid
'Scandinavian' dissections of emotion 'in the light ofmodern
psychology', and 'thewarmly erotic'.9
It was, therefore, a very particular Picasso that Anthony
Blunt used as a weapon to irritate and provoke at Marl
borough College. Itwas not the Picasso who began to emerge
publicly almost immediately after Blunt delivered his 1924
lecture; not 'thewarmly erotic' Picasso of theMarie-Th?r?se
Walter paintings of later in the decade; not the Picasso who
was to morbidly explore the Freudian death drive within
as he
months, completed The dance (1925; T?te, London); not
the political Picasso who was to paint Guernica and join the
Communist Party. Blunt never found these erotic, morbid,
political Picassos easy to take; he always remained a rational
ist, suspicious of the sensational, unsettled by politics, and eva
sive in the face of the erotic inmodern art, especially Picasso's
art. The intention of this article is to consider Blunt's Picasso
as the artist he was then able to see and to whom he could
relate. To do so entails a consideration of the Picasso he could
not see, or could see only dimly, indistincdy, hesitandy. Most
important and most consistent, the Picasso Blunt could only
dimly discern was the 'warmly erotic' Picasso, and also, at least
in certain registers, the Picasso engaged with horror and
death.
It has been saidmore than once thatBlunt started off in the
- -
1930s by then a young research fellow at Cambridge inside
Bloomsbury, and ended the decade rejecting all that it stood
for. There is truth in this statement, but it tends to divert
attention from certain important features of his writing. There
is, on one level, a continuity between the first phase, which
ends early in 1934, and the second, which runs on until late
1938: a continuity that has links all theway back to Blunt the
schoolboy. Blunt never ceased towrite as a rational humanist
and always rejected the suggestively irrational in writing on
art. One instance of this in the earlier 1930s phase, when he
was still producingupdated, personalised 'Bloomsburiana', is
his review published in The Spectator of Adrian Stokes's The
Quattro Cento when thatwilful, brilliandy evocative study of
Italian fifteenth-century architecture came out in 1932. Blunt
viewed Stokes's prose style as 'at first sight. . .unintelligible'.
'Mr. Stokes's free use', he goes on, 'of such curious or dan
gerous phrases as stone blossom, rhythm, and incrustation is,
at any rate, alarming.'10 This kind of elusive prose always
alarmed him, asmuch after as before 1934.
In the historical circumstances, there is nothing very
surprising about the shiftwithin the Cambridge Aposdes, to
which Blunt and Guy Burgess belonged in the early 1930s,
from a pervasive humanism (particularly characteristic of
Bloomsbury's Apostles) to the upbeat communism with its
rigid logic that took over with the hunger marches of 1933.IX
From the late 1880s onwards, the Cambridge Aposdes had
been committed to a stance that subjected passion to rational,
-
logical analysis in crystal-clear prose in their response to art
as to anything else. For Roger Fry, who had been an Aposde
in the late 1880s, just before Bertrand Russell, art aroused
emotion first, but art theory and criticism required reason to
take over if itwas to say anything convincing. Confronted
with the Britain of the Depression, and with the disaster of
the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Blunt, along with many of
his Cambridge friends, similarly moved from an immediate
emotional response of horror and outrage to the place within
themselves where they felt secure, to the reassuring clarity
of rational analysis. But reason, by then equipped with the
readymade rigour of Marxist dialectics, allowed Blunt to
make a move thatRoger Fry and his associates could never,
perhaps, have made, that of a decisive shift away from indi
vidual experience to a collective vision of history. On one
level,Marxism was forBlunt the reverse of evasion for itmade
him confront, for the first time, the problem of the relation
ship between art and society, thus ensuring that he would
never forget that artwas part of history as understood in that
larger sense. On another level, however, Blunt's Marxism
sanctioned evasion: itgave him more compelling reasons than
he had ever had before to evade coming to terms with the
morbid and the 'warmly erotic' in personal experience,
particularly asmanifested in art, above all in the new Surreal
ist art of Picasso. Blunt's version ofMarxist theory became
an extremely effective way of screening off the intense
emotional responses that Picasso could still arouse in him.
There is something revealing about the fact thatwhen, in
May 1937, Blunt theMarxist fully confronts Picasso's work
of the 1930s for the first time, he calls what he sees at Paul
Rosenberg's Paris gallery not simply Surrealist but 'emotion
alist'.12 Picasso's Cubism, for Blunt, no longer resolves 'prob
lems of form', but is a mere 'ingenious' games-playing with
form; and Picasso is no longer in any sense an artistworking
logically, but in all his manifestations can now be firmly cate
gorised as irrational, as a Cubist play-maker or a Surrealist
'emotionalist', or both at once. Inwhatever register he works,
he is now to be fitted into a historical development that has
seen modern art progressively escape the social
instability of
theworld by retreating from it,first into the private pleasures
of Cubist games, and then into the private thrills of Surrealist
emotional release. Following Blunt's new Marxist logic, such
trickerywith form and so personal an 'emotionalism' could
have no collective force, and thus could only exist on themar
gins of history. The word 'erotic' was not often deployed by
Blunt in his writings on art, but in this review he certainly
could, perhaps even should, have used itbecause his reaction,
especially to theMarie-Th?r?se Walter pictures of the early
1930s (Fig.24), betrays a strong awareness of their 'warm
eroticism'. It is an awareness that revealingly goes with
- not
discomfort simply the discomfort of a homosexual

8 As recalled in
Blunt, op. cit. (note 2), p. 166. Russell, G. Lowes Dickinson and, later,Anthony Blunt, Julian Bell and Guy Burgess.
9 12A.
J.E. Bowie: 'Volour', The Heretick 2 (June 1924), pp.5-6. Blunt: 'Picasso, 1930-1934', The Spectator (9thApril 1937), p.664.
10A. Blunt: J3Bid.
'Quattro Cento', The Spectator (30th July 1932), p. 161.
11The h Ibid.
Aposdes was a conversazione society founded atCambridge University in 1820
to which several futuremembers of Bloomsbury were elected as well as Bertrand

28 JANUARY 2OO5 CXLVII THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE

 ANTHONY BLUNT'S PICASSO

24. Sleeping nude, by Pablo

Picasso. 1932. 130 by 161.7
cm. (Mus?e Picasso, Paris).

confronted by heterosexual erotica, but a more profound world under rational control. Itwas Marxist logic that allowed
discomfort in the face of paintings so utterly devoted toAndr? him to marginalise this aspect of Picasso as capable of only
a ? -
Breton's 'convulsive beauty'. For once, Blunt's enviable reaching class his own, the bourgeoisie thatwas doomed
verbal ease lets him down: his prose is inadequate to the task by history, and incapable of reaching the class of the future,
of conveying the obvious intensity of his direct response to the proletariat. In thatway, he could continue to recognise
works such as these. He can only find pedestrian phrases such the beauty and force of this Picasso, so long as he did not
as 'a queer sensuality, a sort of fleshy attraction', and his lame so long as he confessed
probe too deeply into its nature and
conclusion is that these nudes, with their 'bulging curves' that there was something unwholesome even about his own
and 'richness of colour . . .make an
appeal about as unintel taste for it.
lectual as can wellbe imagined'.13 For a few lines, the awk As an enthusiastic dialectician, Blunt needed to identify
wardness and weakness of thewriting betrays the erotic force clear-cut polarities: rational against irrational, Cubism against
he could sense in the pictures, and the threat that such a force Surrealism, private against public, the declining bourgeoisie
posed to the intellectual control that invariably underlined his against the rising proletariat. He ended his pre-Guemica piece
coolly efficient prose. He is led finally into a rare display of on early 1930s Picasso by invoking 'realism' as the only
confessional self-consciousness: 'All this produces a kind of healthy antidote to the unwholesome beauty of Picasso's post
painting which will appeal to those whose minds, like mine, Cubist painting. His critical standards were sufficiendy intact
are clogged in a love of the obscure and the unusual, but it is for him to realise that the Soviet Socialist Realism he had seen
doubtful whether it has much to contribute to the develop on a visit toRussia in 193 5 could not challenge that unwhole
ment of painting at the present time. It is the last refinement some beauty. Just as, he reassured his readers in that piece, the
of dead tradition ....
a It is a lovely decay which will give early Christians had taken time to produce an art adequate to
pleasure to those who are themselves involved [like Blunt their new religious faith, so therewas, unsurprisingly, a time
himself, of course] in the general decline of which it is the lag between the building of the new Soviet faith and the
finest expression.'14
invention of a new art adequately capable of representing its
This review, written just pre-Guemica, is particularly telling heroes and myths. But still, even as early as 1935, two years
because of the clarity with which it exposes the splitwithin before his 1937 article on Picasso, he was able to identify a
Blunt between his intense personal response not just to the Socialist Realist figure strong enough, as he saw it, tomake the
'emotional'in Picasso but to the 'warmly erotic' in Picasso's challenge. To the other dialectical polarities that structured his
female nudes as well, and Blunt's need to keep art and the thinking, he added one more: Picasso against Diego Rivera.
THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE CXLVII JANUARY 2005 29
ANTHONY BLUNT'S PICASSO

- a
and rationalism were, for him, indissolubly linked ration
* **m
TM? innrer*
m
b* al view of painting, he argued in theMarxist Left Review in

World I937> went with faith in the outer world.17 'Anti-rational'

Two Artists and the Outside reason
NT painting favoured the imagination above and exter
?y ANTHON Y ?U
DURING the tad, h***** ?m***jr
o? im?ato
M ?** ***?.tm ?Hi?*tant ft?, m^Mtwn**? nalised the inner. Sane, reasonable and optimistic, the new
realism of Rivera was a public art looking outwards: Rivera's
*s??g?ft isA??orM, ****>
the??**HN9NX* fwwffeu to ?.?AI S*thcm?r*****"*?"?I
****< rr realism was all that post-Cubist art, in its irrational obsessions,
.{?$&m f*5 mm Mt**fe? Mi*h#* **tej*****#***
mhmm fMatMcumi *?wmI ********* <* *> could never be.
ftwiy *W
**StM*S*ta?*>***? 1*** ****** *fe****f
as
ta*p?wm ^ i*9i??i ?*e*4of wt>?****! hm?
? Otf? * m ?f il*
m?mk In 1938, when Blunt presented Picasso and Rivera
nmrnmrn MK?i sife*****
Sri?!??.. Newm?$yHkr ?A fdw?M *******m ?
*; the
modern painting's thesis and antithesis, the works he chose
*M?? wfe? iwtte? a ?es?*
inte ?fMIT????? 4a?*trt
?^ T%k?**.'i.pMftob (?mal&***?fai*w??**m??** to compare were Rivera's Detroit murals and (predictably)
TS*imMoM. te WhM ? ?Wutnl ih?ft h****4**?s
m?as? *??*
M ?1*4? ?teqps 1
w* brtef ?i the
11?fi?4*!??oiitasc* M Snnwiwa?
Allste valae<#tlw)4M?iR>tMM. *ad?f*i?tiWMMu?? Picasso's Guernica (Fig.25). Given Blunt's choice of Rivera as
m OTO?*Spfe thCluhcWrttM?^
tlUii ******** *pf*M
te iMar?d?f?sKW mtftd'lfyi>1*?!w*m?ku**rtam *fei? his model for the optimistic Socialist Realism he wanted, and
fat*?f?*#* !?*H*wn ?f ***** ?khat. ?te tfiry #?
OMt*;*?WtNl)? |Wiii??f*i|M Ar?*$?m tCKKVttt, ?f IN
O? f?? ?I?***** f?MVy.
??m* * te m?, ?ft*
*nkma mycuMCtw?
^??1?** p*m?%?*? *s
?ows?oI
te mh
his disillusionment with Picasso the unwholesome Surrealist,
?mdsm,at. tup?l il?*iwr*i?e. Ihry
?>*?? ?lseir
?rckmt
S?if?M ttlhitttKMKI?h*?*?* t???fe*?
tte?* ?4*e??f ?M?
k ?nr<h?sw
his rejection of Picasso's great painting as a politically impo
a tii^miie?h?tn? ?ss? s ?*o*?fil????.that
* ??HAI IttlSflKf f??l? ??**t**?i
l?&mme&wm%hmt mike m$ ??$ m?t ?? '^ mtut?tmcf
i*M;
tent 'private brainstorm' was highly predictable. More, in fact,
MhjKk 1Is**? HK4(?* m*?-m?tbtkkam??pamliAt s
b? ?*r**toM>ir4f Ihr?rtwtir lindofart.
*--*Mh TW***'
tas ??|? ?ssthe??w r? ?Ik? ?im
?Mi ?fimiuiiim than the erotic, what had from 1935 repeatedly struck him as
fess!?
'?f lite
wdsject*??yntna wimm fet*s minfa? ??wr?
(?.JpMmiM# mmj????taf^ ?*!N?* condition of modern
particularly expressive of the doomed
?V?i^? wte*T^im#
.**??
athet.Sixasmar? m ?isl? mi?feit
il?!?
fcte. owmn
??sssi.pf?*lm?*? ifc*tkarm,ntkraaawi. ii?Mfwisi?MS?
off?bum, su
??I GnaSr.'il?**JUt#r lnK?r4iniN.
t?f T^tiisig culture under capitalism, was what he called the 'nightmares'
S?stosOutie*.?csaihn?n <rfS-M^esiNMnrtamiusud-milk
tHrVM?tntt nWHMMMH ?*W?*t ***?bar?i?ssBtidrf?af ta of Surrealism. Early in 1936, Picasso's etching Minotauromachy
mi?twnha.??prasfii 4
sjfi was put on show at Zwemmer's gallery and bookshop in Lon
=**puMufc?ity-.ihr
jw.
U>tta?c
Arasai
??Ppt??tji?j don. Itwas this that convinced Blunt finally that Picasso had
i?*
toce*?it.
Ntw.?V-J?i?!,?Satii.i
l?wriHIH
t-i??ipt!**, ?cf.? become (in his words) 'a full-blown Superrealist'. 'The result
t??i?I ?Il the&r:,?U
lAfdlieili? Swrailfxtn,
IIK? *WI* h*ff
4t*3Wi is, of course', he wrote, 'the nightmare of a great artist, reflect
pmnf en m tic twld, ing both the general instability of the time and, it is said, per
m^ 1?rr-^- f ffe
%S?mjA
firi?
wm.item
) <i(
ihrNxi.N
p?MtJKSiisr?i-
te sonal disturbance.'18 For Blunt, 'nightmare' Surrealism could
tonut?V"??
iespt&nt
?S??
iktep.AmiW ps?v
^ie j?u*eatlt*??wfctetm?
?MBfas
% tmilmmmtsK^
only speak about all thatwas negative and destructive in the
ti?tkimhsn|
of?Jw*??a
t*hit*
Mfti
m ?**a! ihr individual and in themodern condition.
Km*IIxIsife?lM?
bK s*ar
?m? araM?d
w?s ??? It has become an art-historical orthodoxy to read works
such as Minotauromachy and what Blunt called Surrealist
'nightmares' in relation to Freud's theory of the death instinct:
the correlation Freud had found in 1920 between sadism in
25. Guernica, by Pablo Picasso, and a detail of amural by Diego Rivera inDetroit, human behaviour and the drive to return to the condition of
illustratingA. Blunt: 'Two Artists and theOutside World', The Listener (28th July the organism before Ufe. But, in 1936, Blunt could only see
1938).
and read such images as negative and destructive in a particu
lar historical, not in a general psychological sense, as the symp
Blunt knew Rivera's murals inMexico, New York and toms of a doomed pre-socialist world, tearing itself apart.
Detroit only from reproductions, especially those published in Guernica was a Surrealist 'nightmare' explicitly linked to a real
Rivera's Portrait ofAmerica (1934), and by 1938 he suspected act of destruction. How could Blunt, locked into his dialecti
?
thatJos? Clemente Orozco, from among theMexican mural cal polarities especially between Surrealism and realism,
?
ists,was actually a better painter than Rivera. But in 1938, Picasso and Rivera have responded to the picture with any
when he used a radio broadcast and a Listener article to estab thing but dismay? How, he asked, could the private 'night
lish the polarity he believed most important in the art of the mare' imagery of horror function positively as propaganda for
-
moment - that between post-Cubism and realism he confi a large public, especially a large proletarian public?

dently put Rivera forward as Picasso's antithesis.15 Here

was Yet, just as he could see and feel the 'warm eroticism' of
a painter who had gone through a Cubist apprenticeship in Picasso's Marie-Th?r?se nudes, Blunt could see and feel the
Paris and applied the lessons he had learned there, not, like sheer force of Guernica, and conflict emerges once again in
to stabilise what Blunt thought of as a Surrealist as well as
Picasso, everything he wrote about it in 1937 and 1938,
retreat into themost private inner zones of his unconscious, in 'Picasso Unfrocked', his review of the suite of etchings,
but rather to give monumentality to an optimistic, outgoing, The dream and lie ofFranco (Fig.26), produced alongside Guer
public art. Here was an artistwho, he had already written in nica.19This time the conflict was between his openness to their
1935, had done this in socialist Mexico and capitalist North horror, on an emotional level, and his determination not to let
America. Unlike Soviet Socialist Realism, Rivera's was a their force destabilise the good order of his rationalisation of
at the
'new realism', Blunt had written then, because it used the history. In all these texts, Blunt's prose betrays his thrill
lessons taught by the artistic revolution of Cubism.16 Realism force ofwhich Picasso was capable and, at the same
horrifying

*sA. Blunt: '7 Idem: 'The Realism

'Two Artists and the Outside World', The Listener (28th July 1938), Quarrel', Left Review (April 1937).
18 Idem: 'ANew
p.182. Picasso', The Spectator (3rd January 1936), p.15.
16 Idem: 'The Art of 19 Idem: 'Picasso Unfrocked', The
Diego Rivera', The Listener (17th April 1935), p.652. Spectator (8thOctober 1937), p.584.

30 JANUARY 2OO5 CXLVII THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE

 ANTHONY BLUNT'S PICASSO

26. The dream and lie ofFranco, by

Pablo Picasso. 1937.
i:^.,.
Etching, 31.4 by 42.1 cm. Kif
j|
;i^
(Mus?e Picasso, Paris).

time, his dismay at the negative destructiveness of his images and the 'erotic' which might connect with psychoanalytic
and their lack of any outgoing optimism. Guernica, he wrote, discourse, but he condenses here an argument made with
a decade before in
was 'a mere nightmare picture, and nothing else'; of the psychoanalysis very much inmind nearly
?
Dream and lie etchings 'the rest of the world will atmost see Paris by the critic Carl Einstein the argument that if artists
and shudder and pass by'. Picasso, he wrote, should have been such as Picasso have developed private mythologies against
able to grasp 'more than the mere horror of the civil war', the collective grain, the imagery they have released connects
should have seen it as 'only a tragic part of a great forward with shared desires and fears.22Blunt understood well enough
movement', and should not have made so 'abstruse' and the relevance of psychoanalysis to Surrealism, but he was
an image.20 Always behind what Blunt says about unable or unwilling to use his knowledge of it to see that
personal
Guernica is the unspoken conviction thatRivera should have Guernica need not be just Picasso's nightmare and thatfrom an

painted it instead. incalculable number of viewpoints, political or otherwise,

As we now know, Blunt was simply wrong: Guernica others would be able to connect with it.
has functioned extraordinarily effectively as a propagandist By the 1950s, Blunt himself knew well enough that he

painting. However private its iconography, its force as

an had been wrong about Guernica. His lastmajor statement on
image of pain and death has repeatedly been tapped in public Picasso came in 1969 with the publication of his little book on

campaigns aimed against militarisation and war. 'Picasso the painting. Itwas based on a series of lectures which culmi
Unfrocked' provoked a famous controversy in the letter pages nated in a new analysis of thework. The lectures were given
of The Spectator, the opposition eloquendy led by Herbert inCanada in 1966 and were developed from lectures on Guer
Read and Roland Penrose. It is Penrose who puts his finger nica given annually at the Courtauld Institute in the 1950s and
on what Blunt's Marxism prevented him from seeing in the 1960s, and publicly in the later 1950s across the British Isles.
etchings and in Guernica. He is especially critical of Blunt's By then, just as Picasso had become an old master, Blunt
argument that it is the 'essentially private' character of too had become a master art historian with an international
more and
Picasso's imagery that renders it incapable of connecting with reputation. And just as Picasso in the 1950s became
no more be possible', wrote Penrose, more deeply engaged in his relationship to the old masters, so
people in general. 'It can
'to exclude "private" experience and emotion from the arts Blunt became increasingly concerned with the relationship
than from love. In both cases it is the personal emotion which between Picasso's art and the art of the past. In the 1930s, his
renders them universal.'21 He does not use terms like 'sex' reductive Marxist historical method had compelled him to

20 Ibid. 22C. Einstein: 'Andr? Masson, ?tude ethnologique', Documents i, no.2 (1929),
21R. Penrose: 'Letter to the editor', The Spectator (29th October 1937), p.747. pp.93-105.

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE CXLVII JANUARY 2005 3*

ANTHONY BLUNT'S PICASSO

detach the Picasso of Guernica from

the larger logic of the
history of class struggle: he could only, therefore, set aside
the expressive force he felt in the picture as an irrelevance. By
contrast, his book on Guernica of thirtyyears later is above all
dedicated to embedding the Picasso of Guernica in history
conceived on a grand scale, but the history, not primarily of
class struggle but rather of art, artists and ideas. He now saw
artists as no longer subordinate to impersonal historical
? ?
processes, however much theymay be like Picasso caught
up in political events. He returned to the argument that had
scandalised his artmaster atMarlborough: that Picasso was to
be understood above allwithin the larger logic of art history.
The Canadian lectures on Picasso that led to Blunt's study
of Guernica were given in the year after the publication of
another book on Picasso that caused amuch greater stir than
Blunt's: John Berger's Success and Failure ofPicasso, aMarxist's
Picasso for the era of the Cold War. It is instructive to look at
the two books together because it then becomes easier to dis 27. Studyfor 'The Crucifixion', by Pablo Picasso. 1929. Pencil on paper, dimensions
cern the Picasso thatBlunt could see only dimly or not at all. unknown. (Whereabouts unknown; repr. inA. Blunt: Picasso's 'Guernica',Oxford
1969).
Blunt's book is structured by his overriding determination to
place Picasso within what he saw as the logic of art-historical
development, although the logic he uncovers functions more Internationale. Naive artists, he reflected, were too ignorant
on the smaller scale of Picasso's own development than on of the art of the past to be able to cope with the really big
that of cultural history in the largest sense. It gives order to subjects such as the bombing of Guernica. Such subjects
Blunt's reading of Picasso's development through Cubism and require 'contact with the accumulated store of knowledge
Surrealism to Guernica, as well as of the progression of Picas about the arts'.23 In 1937, Rivera was the painter he had in
so's ideas for the picture through the succession of preliminary mind as the one figure to have the art-historical knowledge to
sketches made between the ist and ioth May 1937 and the take on big subjects. Now, in the 1960s, it is Picasso. The
seven photographed phases of the painting itself. In his outline Guernica book culminates in a succession of comparisons
of Picasso's development, Blunt has moved to a much more between the picture and major paintings from the 'great
sophisticated and complex understanding of, above all, Picas European tradition' that finally places it securely in the large
so's Cubism. He no longer writes of it as an inward-turning, frame he has designed for it: art history. Ingres's Jupiter and
formal game directed towards abstraction but writes of it instead Thetis from the nineteenth century, Guido Reni's Massacre of
as a new way of seeing and representing the world, funda the Innocents from the seventeenth century, and the Spanish
mental to the expressive distortions later achieved in Guernica. Apocalypse of St Sever from the eleventh century are all
Turning to Berger's book, we find a shared fastidiousness found to feature in the 'accumulated store of knowledge' that
in theway both writers separate Picasso theman from Picasso Picasso has adapted to the expressive demands of his subject.
the artist, and how they concentrate all their analytical The painting is finally embedded in a European history of
powers on the latter. For Blunt, even as a schoolboy, itwas images that stretches back to the eleventh century, and indeed
always the work and itsmeanings seen in some large histori beyond, to Antiquity.
cal framework that counted. No less than Berger, he rejected What then of the relationship between the 'private' and the
-
the growing obsession during the 1950s and 1960s with public the use in Guernica of an imagery of horror dredged
Picasso theman. But Berger, of course, insisted on both art's from the psychological interior as well as from the art of the
and the artist's relationship to society, and, just as had Blunt in past? In the 1960s, Blunt unrepentandy and unequivocally
the later 1930s, so too he finds Picasso wanting, above all takes the line thatRead and Penrose had espoused in 1937.
- -
because the ironies are compounded in retrospect he Once again, this time in great detail, he brings out the degree
has only been able to identify with the doomed bourgeois to which the symbols deployed in Guernica are in origin
society of the present. And again, just as had Blunt in the symbols excavated from a psychological interior, 'butwhereas
1930s, so too Berger sees no logic in Picasso's development, ... in the earlier
phase they had been themeans of expressing
only discontinuities. a private and personal tragedy, under the impulse of the
For Blunt now, the logic of Picasso's development is insep Spanish Civil War Picasso was able to raise them to an alto
arable from the continuity and comprehensiveness of Picasso's gether higher plane and use them to express his reaction to a
?
relationship to the art of the past. In 1937, Blunt had followed cosmic tragedy' the tragedy of human violence and war.24
his first response to Guernica in The Spectatorwith a piece on a What is telling, however, about this change of tack is the
show dedicated to naive painting at the Paris Exposition fact that, although the private, personal aspect is recognised

23A. Blunt: 'Modem 24A. Blunt: Picasso's 'Guernica',Oxford

Primitives', The Spectator (3rd September 1937), p. 138. The 1969, p.26.
exhibition he was 25 Ibid.
reviewing was 'Ma?tres Populaires de la r?alit?', a joint venture of
theMus?e de Grenoble and theMuseum ofModem Art, New York. 26
J. Berger: Success and Failure ofPicasso, London 1965, pp. 166-67.

32 JANUARY 2OO5 CXLVII THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE

 ANTHONY BLUNT'S PICASSO

deployed in Guernica does not distance Picasso's figures but

brings them unbearably close. Picasso, he writes, develops the
idea for the picture by irrmgining suffering 'as he daily hears
the news from his own country'.26 Through Picasso's extraor
dinarily physical projections of his figures, he writes, 'we are
made to feel their pain with our eyes. And pain is the protest
of the body.'27 The picture works not through allegory
and symbol but through the 'intense physical subjectivity' of
the corporeal experience that it conveys. It is not Guernica's
embeddedness in history that, in the end, concerns him, but its
sheer, physical immediacy, one that lifts it out of history into
the zone of the personal, yet gives the painting its effectiveness
as a statement within history.
There can be no doubt thatBlunt feltGuernica's power too,
and at a very deep level, as was apparent from the intensity
that informed his annual lecture on the picture, given at the
Courtauld Institute. In the mid-1960s he is known to have
startedwith images of his close friends from the 1930s Julian
28. Anthony
Blunt reading his Bell and John Cornford, both of whom lost their lives in
press conference Spain, thereby instandy connecting the picture to his own
statement, 20th
personal history and his private sense of loss, and doing sowith
November 1979,
in the offices of unforgettable feeling.28 The direct impact of Guernica on him
The Times in must have kept him thinking about it. But in his writings as
London.
an art critic and historian, even where the Picasso of Guernica
was concerned, Blunt could not use his intellect to deal with
positively, it is an external event alone, the Civil War, that the deep, private ways in which such a work affected him.
elevates it,Blunt contends, onto a universal plane. The argu Perhaps in the lecture room of the Courtauld, speaking to his
ment implicit in Penrose's -
1937 position that the collective own, he could for a few minutes bring the private and
force of Picasso's imagery, its capacity to exceed the personal, the public together. But in print, where his public was poten
is rooted in shared experiences at an inner, psychological level tially anyone and everyone, he always separated these two
?
is ignored. Psychoanalysis is leftunmentioned in the book. aspects, at least where Picasso was concerned, keeping apart
Berger too leaves psychoanalysis unmentioned. But he his own responses and his controlling need to
immediate
does not use Marxist dialectics tomarginalise the personal and comprehend them within the framework of history.
private. He confronts his own responses to Picasso's work The evasions in Blunt's writings on Picasso are merely
- or at
head on least, he confronts head on the power of the furthermanifestations of the determination with which the
corporeal distortions in Picasso's work, and their physical private Blunt was always kept separate from the public Blunt.
on a level in away thatBlunt sim
impact phenomenological Berger theMarxist, on the other hand, unhesitatingly brought
never does. There is amoment when Blunt's evasions on the personal into the field of analysis. Sometimes in Blunt's
ply
a private level emerge particularly clearly. It comes when he
writing on Picasso there are suggestions of the private causing
analyses the Magdalene studies (Fig.27) related to Picasso's some surface turbulence in his prose, but never more than
1930 Crucifixion (Mus?e Picasso, Paris), inwhich the figure of that. The privacy of personal response was always kept sepa
the nude Magdalene is bent so far backwards that her anus rate from the public business of writing art history, even
surmounts her head. Blunt says not a thing about that dis where Guernica was his topic. Picasso himself, by contrast,
turbingly suggestive juxtaposition but merely comments on developed his art, especially towards the end of his Ufe, as an
the way, as he puts it, 'the underside of the nose is given a increasingly transparent vessel of communication, disclosing
quite irrational prominence'.25 Nowhere does he consider it his own most private desires and fears to the public gaze. And,
relevant to bring out what he had called in 1937 the 'queer just as Picasso confessed publicly to his private obsessions in
sensuality' of somuch of Picasso's work of the late 1920s and his work of the 1960s, so Blunt was engaged in making
1930s. By contrast, Berger the 1960s Cold War Marxist, gives his own very different confessions at 20 Portman Square.
it a central importance in his book, even in his treatment of However oblique, Picasso's were out in the open, but Blunt's,
Guernica, towhich he responds both viscerally and analytical of course, were made in secret. Their eventual public conse
ly. For him, the key to the expressive force of the painting lies, quences (Fig. 2 8) have been just as difficult for the scholarly
in fact, in the sheer physicality of Picasso's sensual response to community and beyond to confront as he himself seems to
the human figure in the 1930s. But for him, the sensuality have found his own most personal responses to Picasso.

2? and Frances Cornford. Both men were killed in Spain fighting for theRepublicans;
ifci?, p.167.
28Evidence for this comes from Courtauld Institute for their double biography, see P. Stansky andW. Abrahams: Journey to theFrontier,
graduates who heard the Guer
nica lecture at this time. Julian Bell (1908?37), poet, son of Clive and Vanessa Bell and London 1966.
a Cambridge contemporary of Blunt; John Cornford (1915?36), poet, son of Francis

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE CXLVII JANUARY 2005 33