November 2008

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Among the minor charges that can be laid at Anthony Blunt’s door is the way that he cast his personality over the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, of which he was director from 1947 to 1974. In private he was usually kindly and encouraging to his students, but in public his air of Olympian aloofness – so well caught by Alan Bennett in his 1991 play A Question of Attribution – encouraged a sense that the Courtauld, and even perhaps the study of art history, was a snobbish and exclusive enclave.

That may seem an unduly negative way to approach the history of a world-famous institution that this academic year is celebrating its 75th anniversary: it opened its doors to students in October 1932. However, Blunt’s reputation highlights aspects of the Courtauld’s legacy and reputation that deserve discussion. These go back to a division of opinion among its founders and first director, William Constable. The Institute was the brainchild of three men, who shared a background in connoisseurship and collecting: Viscount Lee of Fareham, Samuel Courtauld and Sir Robert Witt. Courtauld in particular had a vision of the institute teaching the study and appreciation of art to a wide audience, using the resource of his art collection; Constable, by contrast, envisaged a postgraduate school of high-powered scholarship.

Thanks to its successive directors, Constable, Thomas Boase and then Blunt, the Courtauld combined the teaching that produced a new cadre of academic art historians, museum curators and dealers with outstanding research. Distinguished as Blunt was, it was a group of medievalists of the highest calibre – notably Christopher Hohler and George Zarnecki – who largely created the Courtauld’s international academic reputation.

Yet questions about the Courtauld’s purpose have never gone away, especially after art history became widely established as a university subject. They were raised emphatically during London University’s radical reorganisation in the 1990s, which pulled a number of its small academic institutions into a new School of Advanced Study. This was successfully resisted by the Courtauld. Its circumstances are as a result in some ways more similar to what they were in 1932 than they had been for decades. Reduced Government financial support means that, like all uk universities and colleges, the Courtauld needs private support. In the 1930s it had Courtauld’s millions to draw on; in 2001 the J. Paul Getty Trust gave a large part of the capital endowment it needed for independence. As a result its character has changed surprisingly little since the 1930s, most notably in its almost exclusive emphasis on Western fine art.

The Courtauld’s future now seems secure, but did it make the right decision in opting to go it alone? Part of the problem, it seems to me, is fundamental: art history is not an ideal discipline for an undergraduate degree. It is far more fruitfully studied by those who have some higher-education experience of literature, classical or modern languages and, above all, history. That is why those medievalists were so important: the nature of their specialism meant that they assumed students needed some mastery of other disciplines. This ideal has mostly been abandoned in what now often seems
a largely anglophone subject, in which students increasingly focus on art after 1900, narrowing still further the inherent narrowness of the discipline. That is not
a problem only for the Courtauld, of course, but although the hauteur with which Blunt enfolded it may have departed, the danger of intellectual self-absorption, or even isolationism, is acute in the sort of institution that it has chosen to be.

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