Pictures and movies

Blunt and Bond: two products of British spy culture which, on balance, turned out to be the one area where the British unequivocally out-shone their opposite numbers - regardless of unequal resources. They had the wider range of imagination and an empire mind-set which left lee-way for outcomes and hedges. Left or Right. The adoption of the US modernist cultural plan must have been seen as one kind of hedge. Evidence on all sides underlines there was never any emotional commitment to futurist views... most likely they were the butt of blimpish jokes and gut distaste rather than understanding of the genuine/phony issues involved.

It seems unlikely that Blunt felt akin to the Russian experimental people - today more widely respected than his own hero: the painter Poussin. So here we have a hidden communist spy with a royal position, at home in those circles - an evening with Malevich and Tatlin would probably have seemed to him some kind of social purgatory. He fitted far more into the world of the Bond movie and its glamourous view of intrigue and adventure - although his life must have been often bleak. Gathering around himself a coterie of aesthetes who looked back into a Renaissance Utopia rather than face the kind of modernism which was to be seen on the streets of London. While at the same time (’50s/’60) the Royal Academy was running its county-set resistance to the local moderns - with early backing from Churchill.

So the political cross-currents could be guaged across a spectrum spanning Britain’s greatest coup in popular culture (alongside pop music) and RA backwoodsmen.

Resistance to modernism was beaten back via political necessity - had there been no war none of this could ever have happened. Continental modernist ideas would have been an increasing influence amongst a few but the refugee elements which did so much to animate the scene would not have been there ; ditto the art-sohool system as expanded under a socialist policy. So modernism slipped through by force but in a distorted form... no other ideas have challenged that. Its form is in the remit of the establishment. Cultural policy in its essence negotiated by spy-culture. For this reason if no other, a civilian policy of the highest order is still conducted in secret by non-professionals. If I’m wrong let’s have the full history on the table explaining exactly what happened. Where is the legitimacy in any of it being secret at any time?

As indicated, it has its frissons and allure and Bond is its one universal coup, but set against the powerful ideas it pushed aside via those policies (which can no longer be called conspiracy theory) no one will trust anything if silence continues to reign.

In the UK the discipline of art history is still very much hit by these unresolved issues which have long passed into internalized principles.