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letsdothis2 ago

Ben Golomstock : Miranda Sex Garden Interview on Videowave

Father was Igor Golomstock https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/02/igor-golomstock-obituary

The art historian Igor Golomstock, who has died aged 88, is best known for his book Totalitarian Art (1990), the first serious study of the similarities between the socialist realist art of Stalinist Russia and the art of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Maoist China, an area of debate long considered taboo in Igor’s native country, Russia.

In Igor’s book, which I translated, he argued that such similar artworks demonstrated “the universality of the mechanisms of totalitarian culture”, regardless of whether the regime was on the far right or the far left – a view very much at odds with the official Soviet line.

The Forger and the Spy by Igor Golomstock https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-forger-and-the-spy/

At the time, I knew Anthony Blunt to be not only a prominent art historian but the director of the prestigious Courtauld Institute and curator of the Queen’s art collection. I had also read his books on the 17th-century French classicist Nicolas Poussin and on the early Picasso. What I did not know was that he was also the mysterious “fourth man” of the notorious Cambridge spy ring whose other members—Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby—had been exposed by British intelligence (and fled to safe haven in Moscow). All three of the latter—like Blunt himself, they were either homosexual or bisexual—had been recruited by the KGB in the 1930’s, had become loyal servants of the Stalinist regime, and during World War II and later, from their high-ranking positions in British intelligence and at the British Foreign Office, had passed top secrets to their Soviet patrons. The activities of the Cambridge group are now regarded as the biggest case of political treason in the history of England.