Spy who came in from the Courtauld

As a KGB talent-spotter, Anthony Blunt was a failure. But as an art historian, he excelled. It's because of his influence, Miranda Carter says, that many of his students became big names in the arts world

Anthony Blunt's fame rests largely on his notoriety as the Fourth Man, one of the Cambridge spies. But few people know what his work for the Soviet Union actually involved. Though he spent the war in MI5 passing documents to the KGB, he was first recruited in 1937 as a talent spotter at Cambridge, where he was a young don. His great friend Guy Burgess had selected him for the job because he had reputation for mixing with, and encouraging, young, promising undergraduates. As a KGB talent spotter, Blunt had mixed reviews: he helped recruit only three people, one of whom, American millionaire Michael Straight, was not only a duff and unenthusiastic spy, but eventually exposed Blunt to the FBI.

Blunt's real talent, it later transpired, was for spotting art history talent. From 1947 when he became director of the Courtauld Institute until his retirement in 1973, he discovered, and then found jobs for, several generations of art historians who went on to dominate the art world as academics, curators, and dealers. Today, many of the Courtauld graduates of Blunt's vintage are nearing retirement, but as of three years ago, the Directors of the National Gallery, Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Barber Institute, to name only a few, were all ex-Courtauld students of Blunt's era. His knack as a fixer was bolstered by a passion for art that far outlived any political convictions he might once have held.

The first significant generation of Blunt's Courtauld graduates studied there in the early 1950s, when the institute, tiny and underfunded, was a quiet academic backwater attracting only a handful of students a year. It was the only place to study art history in England. Among the students Blunt taught were the novelist Anita Brookner, the critic Brian Sewell, Sir Alan Bowness, who went on to run the Tate Gallery, John Golding, who went on to write the first major book on Cubism and is curating the big Matisse and Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern next year; the architectural historian Reyner Banham; John Shearman, world expert on Mannerism, who currently holds the Chair in art history at Harvard; and the late Michael Jaffe, world expert on Rubens and former director of the Fitzwilliam museum. Blunt spotted Brookner when she was studying French at London university and began to attend Courtauld lectures. She went on to do a PhD there: "I was completely ignorant, and he was always encouraging and generous," she recalls. Blunt subsequently offered her a job at the institute, where she remained until the 1970s. Sewell was not an academic star at the institute – not least because of his reputation for outraging and infuriating with his outspokenness – but Blunt recognised and was amused by his sharpness and intelligence, and found him a succession of jobs: first, working on a catalogue of the Royal Collection's Old Master drawings, and later at Christie's.

This kind of help was all the more welcome in the 1950s, as the world was hardly crying out for art history graduates. Blunt knew what it was like. He had spent the the 1930s trying to scrape a living in the art world himself. By the 1950s, he had an enviable set of contacts, and he exploited them. He found his students jobs, got their theses published, netted them grants and scholarships. He enjoyed the exercise of his influence, convinced that he was acting in the best interests of the furtherance of the subject – which he often was – and that of the Courtauld Institute, which to him was virtually the same thing.

Blunt's success as a patron and fixer reached apotheosis in the 1960s. As a result of two government reports – and the success of the Courtauld itself – new art history departments were started up in universities and art schools all over the country. As the most experienced and senior teacher of art history in the country, Blunt became the obligatory external adviser for almost every appointment. The art historian John Steer recalls how, after getting on to the shortlist for running the biggest and most prestigious new department at East Anglia (the job went instead to another Courtauld graduate, Peter Lasco), he was badgered by Blunt into agreeing to set up the new department at St Andrews. Steer initially refused. He had never felt himself one of Blunt's favoured inner circle of students, and had no desire to exile himself to the west coast of Scotland. Blunt persisted, turned down all other applicants, and kept phoning until he relented. "The thing was," Steer says now, "that it was completely the right job for me. He was both manipulative and right."

Abroad, Blunt was often described as the most powerful man in British art history, and it is hard to think of a figure of equivalent influence in another area of the humanities: certainly, today this degree of concentration of power could not happen; by an ironic twist it was the very creation of the new courses that diluted the uniqueness and authority of the Courtauld.

Blunt went on talent-spotting well into the 1970s. In his final year as director on a Courtauld summer school to Bavaria in 1973, he encountered a 27-year-old Scottish lawyer, Neil MacGregor, who had given up the bar to study art history in Edinburgh. MacGregor was a fluent French speaker with a wide knowledge of French art and literature and a quick wit. Blunt was sure he had found a star. He set about persuading MacGregor to give up his Edinburgh course and come to the Courtauld, where Blunt promised to tutor him personally. "It was extraordinary," one witness recalled. "Blunt lay siege to him." MacGregor was won over – from the Courtauld he went to a teaching job at Reading University, to the editorship of the Burlington Magazine (Blunt had been a member of its editorial panel for 30 years), and thence to the National Gallery, where he is widely held to have been a hugely successful director. He is nowrumoured to be on the verge of becoming the next director of the British Museum.

Even now, 18 years after he left the Courtauld and 22 years since his exposure as a Soviet spy, Blunt's mark is still apparent. Apart from MacGregor, Nick Serota, head of the Tate Modern, was a postgraduate at the Courtauld in the 1960s; and Nicholas Penny, the man hotly tipped as MacGregor's successor should he go to the BM, was another graduate of the early 1970s who, though not taught by Blunt, was also encouraged by him.

Such achievements may sound like career enough for any man. In fact, fixing and patronage was only one strand of Blunt's life as an art historian. As a writer, his publications spanned studies on Picasso, essays on William Blake and ground-breaking research on Poussin – it is hard to think of another British art historian whose range was so wide. His life-long study of Poussin played an important role in turning the artist from a difficult, unfashionable painter into an old master of the first rank. He was a great teacher, charming and enthusing by example: in tutorials, he seemed to shed his customary reserve and treated his pupils with a seriousness and courtesy that surprised and flattered them. He was an equally compelling lecturer: Nancy Mitford wrote of hearing him lecture in perfect French at the Louvre: "I went to a masterly lecture by a man called Sir Anthony Blunt... Who is this Sir? I am in Love."

As surveyor of the Queen's pictures, he oversaw and modernised the management of one of the largest private art collections in the world. He was the National Trust's first picture adviser, unofficial curator at the Royal Academy, editorial consultant to the Burlington Magazine, and sat on innumerable art committees and panels. He was also a workaholic, rising early every morning to write for two hours before breakfast. More than one colleague later saw in this almost manic, if not punishing, appetite for work, an element of expiation for what he had done during the war.

About the only thing Blunt can be said to have failed at was getting the Queen interested in art. He told friends that, despite all his attempts, she had one all-purpose answer to any question about paintings in her collection. "Dutch!" she would say crisply, and move on to the next one.

'Anthony Blunt: His Lives' by Miranda Carter is published today (Macmillan, £20)