Sir Nikolaus Pevsner | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (1902-01-30)30 January 1902 Leipzig, Kingdom of Saxony, German Empire |
| Died | 18 August 1983(1983-08-18) (aged 81) London, England |
| Resting place | Church of St Peter, Clyffe Pypard, Wiltshire, England |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation(s) | Art andarchitectural historian |
| Notable work | The Buildings of England |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3, includingTom Pevsner |
| Awards | Albert Medal (1975) |
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon PevsnerCBE FBA (30[a] January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British historian who specialised in theart andarchitecture genres. He is best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides,The Buildings of England (1951–1974).
Nikolaus Pevsner was born inLeipzig,Saxony, into a Russian-Jewish family, the son of Anna (née Perlmann) and her husband Hugo Pevsner.[2] He attendedSt. Thomas School, Leipzig, and went on to study at several universities,Munich,Berlin andFrankfurt am Main, before being awarded adoctorate byLeipzig in 1924 for a thesis on theBaroque architecture of Leipzig.[3] In 1923, he married Carola ("Lola") Kurlbaum, the half-Jewish[4] daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum.[5] He worked as an assistant keeper at theDresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928. He converted fromJudaism toLutheranism in young adulthood.[6]
During this period he became interested in establishing the supremacy of German modernist architecture after becoming aware ofLe Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at theParis Exhibition of 1925. In 1928, he contributed the volume onItalian baroque painting to theHandbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, a multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art. He taught at theUniversity of Göttingen between 1929 and 1933, offering a specialist course onEnglish art andarchitecture. According to biographers Stephen Games and Susie Harries, Pevsner welcomed many of the economic and cultural policies of the earlyHitler regime. However, due toNazi race laws he was forced to resign his lectureship at Göttingen in 1933.
His first intention was to move to Italy, but after failing to find an academic post there, Pevsner moved to England in 1933, settling inHampstead at2, Wildwood Terrace, where poetGeoffrey Grigson was his next-door neighbour at No. 3.[7][8][9] Pevsner's first post was an 18-month research fellowship at theUniversity of Birmingham, found for him by friends in Birmingham and partly funded by theAcademic Assistance Council.[10] A study of the role of the designer in the industrial process, the research produced a generally critical account of design standards in Britain which he published asAn Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge University Press, 1937). He was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for theGordon Russell furniture showrooms in London.
By this time Pevsner had also completedPioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, his influential pre-history of what he saw asWalter Gropius' dominance of contemporary design.Pioneers ardently championed Gropius's first two buildings (both pre–First World War) on the grounds that they summed up all the essential goals of 20th-century architecture; in England, however, it was widely taken to be the history of England's contribution to international modernism, and a manifesto forBauhaus modernism, which it was not.[citation needed] In spite of that, the book remains an important point of reference in the teaching of the history of modern design, and helped lay the foundation of Pevsner's career in England as an architectural historian. Since its first publication byFaber & Faber in 1936, it has gone through several editions and been translated into many languages.[11] The second edition, published by theMuseum of Modern Art in 1949, was renamedPioneers of Modern Design.[12]
Pevsner was fully Jewish on his mother and father's side.[13][page needed] Due to his heritage, in 1933 after the Nazi regime enacted theCivil Service Law, he was removed from his teaching post atUniversity of Göttingen.[14][page needed] Shortly after losing his teaching post, Pevsner left Germany for England to find new employment and was able to relocate his wife and children.[15][page needed] Pevsner attempted to get his parents out of Germany, but they delayed their departure largely due to his father Hugo's ill-health and business interests. The couple were actively trying to exit at the time Germany invaded Poland and subsequently entered a state of war, ending their plans. Following her husband's death due to natural causes in 1940, Pevsner's mother Anna was ultimately scheduled for a transport as part of the Nazi'sfinal solution. Instead of bearing this fate, she opted, shortly before her scheduled transport, to commit suicide in Leipzig on 10 February 1942.[16][page needed]
Despite the rise of the Nazi regime, Pevsner sent his children Dieter, Tom, and Uta to visit their mother Lola's family in Germany in August 1939. Uta was the only child without a British-issued passport, using German papers which marked her as Jewish. During their visit Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany shortly after. At the time Uta was waiting for the British embassy in Berlin to process her British passport application. However following the declaration the embassy closed without completing her application. Dieter and Tom were able to leave Germany safely but Uta was forced to stay behind. She survived the war in Germany by posing as "Aryan" and at some points a maid.[17]
Later following his settlement in England he was included in the NaziBlack Book of British residents hostile to the Hitler regime.
Despite his background and persecution, Pevsner was originally a German nationalist and described as "more German than the Germans" to the extent that he supported, in the early days of the Nazi movement, "Goebbels in his drive for 'pure' non-decadent German art".[18] In 1933 he was reported as saying of theNazis: "I want this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos... There are things worse thanHitlerism."[15] Pevsner's political leanings following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 are clearly revealed in several extracts from his diaries and letters that Suzie Harries includes in her 2011 bookNikolaus Pevsner: The Life. For example, the following observation is made by Pevsner on the boat toDover in October 1933: "The second-class is almost entirely occupied by non-Aryans. Dreadful, dreadful – to think that's where I belong."[19]
In 1940, Pevsner was taken to theinternment camp atHuyton,Liverpool, as anenemy alien. Geoffrey Grigson later wrote in hisRecollections (1984): "When at last two hard-facedBow Street runners arrived in the early hours of the morning to take [him] ... I managed, clutching my pyjama trousers, to catch them up with the best parting present I could quickly think of, which was an elegant little edition, a new edition, ofShakespeare's Sonnets."[20] Pevsner was released after three months on the intervention of, among others,Frank Pick, then Director-General of theMinistry of Information. He spent some time in the months afterthe Blitz clearing bomb debris, and wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information'sDie Zeitung, an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England. He also completed forPenguin Books thePelican paperbackAn Outline of European Architecture, which he had begun to develop while in internment.Outline would eventually go into seven editions, be translated into 16 languages, and sell more than half a million copies.[citation needed]
In 1942 Pevsner finally secured two regular positions. From 1936 onwards he had been a frequent contributor to theArchitectural Review and from 1943 to 1945 he stood in as its acting editor while the regular editorJ. M. Richards was on active service. Under theAR's influence, Pevsner's approach to modern architecture became more complex and more moderate.[21] Early signs of a lifelong interest in Victorian architecture, also influenced by theArchitectural Review, appeared in a series written under the pseudonym of "Peter F. R. Donner": Pevsner's "Treasure Hunts" guided readers down selected London streets, pointing out architectural treasures of the 19th century. He was also closely involved with theReview's proprietor,H. de C. Hastings, in evolving the magazine's theories onpicturesque planning.[22] In the same year Pevsner was appointed a part-time lecturer atBirkbeck College, London; he would eventually retire from the college in 1969 as its first Professor of Art History. He lectured atCambridge University for almost 30 years, having beenSlade Professor of Fine Art there for a record six years from 1949 to 1955, and was also theSlade Professor atOxford in 1968.[23]
Framing all this was his career as a writer and editor. After moving to England, Pevsner had found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. Invited byAllen Lane, founder ofPenguin Books, for whom he had written hisOutline and also edited theKing Penguin series,[24] to suggest ideas for future publications, he proposed a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this shortcoming.[25]
"The volumes of the Buildings of England—and now Scotland, Wales and Ireland as well—will be written by, revised and expanded by others, but they will always be known as 'Pevsners'. They are his memorial"
Work on theBuildings of England series began in 1945, and the first volume was published in 1951. Pevsner wrote 32 of the books himself and 10 with collaborators, with a further four of the original series written by others. Since his death, work has continued on the series, which has been extended to cover the rest of the United Kingdom, under the titlePevsner Architectural Guides, now published byYale University Press.[27]
After updating and correctingLondon 1: The Cities of London and Westminster for its reissue in 1962, Pevsner delegated the revision and expansion of further volumes to others, beginning with Enid Radcliffe forEssex (1965).[28] The gazetteer descriptions of revised volumes do not routinely distinguish between Pevsner's original text and any new writing, but more recent books sometimes supply his words in quotation when the revising author's judgement differs, where a building has since been altered, or where the old text is no longer topical.
Although Pevsner oversaw the publication of the initial volumes of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish counterparts ofThe Buildings of England (and in each was credited as "Editor-in-Chief", "Founding Editor" and "Editorial Adviser" respectively) he did not write any of them. As with the revisions of his earlier works, many of these volumes were the work of several contributors. Coverage of the whole of Great Britain was completed in 2023, with the Irish series still in progress.
As well asThe Buildings of England, Pevsner proposed thePelican History of Art series (which began in 1953), a multi-volume survey on the model of the GermanHandbuch der Kunstwissenschaft (English: "Handbook of the Science of Art"), which he would himself edit. Many individual volumes are regarded as classics.
In 1946, Pevsner made the first of several broadcasts on theBBC Third Programme, presenting nine talks in all up to 1950, examining painters and European art eras. By 1977 he had presented 78 talks for the BBC, including theReith Lectures in 1955 – a series of six broadcasts, entitledThe Englishness of English Art,[29] for which he explored the qualities of art which he regarded as particularly English, and what they said about the English national character.[30] HisA. W. Mellon lectures in Fine Art at theNational Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., were published in 1976 asA History of Building Types.[31]
Pevsner was a founding member in 1957 of theVictorian Society, the national charity for the study and protection ofVictorian andEdwardian architecture and other arts.[32] In 1964 he was invited to become its chairman, and steered it through its formative years, fighting alongsideJohn Betjeman,Hugh Casson and others to save houses, churches, railway stations and other monuments of the Victorian age. He served for ten years (1960–70) as a member of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (or Coldstream Committee), campaigning for art history to be a compulsory element in the curriculum of art schools. He was elected a Fellow of theBritish Academy in 1965 and awarded the Gold Medal of theRoyal Institute of British Architects in 1967.[33]
Having assumed British citizenship in 1946, Pevsner was appointed aCBE in 1953 and wasknighted in 1969 "for services to art and architecture". Pevsner also received anHonorary Doctorate fromHeriot-Watt University in 1975.[34]
Pevsner died at his home2, Wildwood Terrace, in August 1983.[35][36] His wife, Lola, predeceased him by 20 years.
His memorial service was held at theChurch of Christ the King, Bloomsbury, the following December, with the memorial address being given byAlec Clifton-Taylor, a friend of 50 years. He is buried in the churchyard of theChurch of St Peter, Clyffe Pypard, inWiltshire, where he and Lola had a cottage. His younger son, Dieter, was an editor atPenguin Books and co-founder with Oliver Caldecott of the publishing companyWildwood House in the 1970s.[37] His elder son,Tom, was a film producer and director who went on to work on severalJames Bond films. Pevsner had many notable students includingPhoebe Stanton.[38]
In 2007, ablue plaque was erected byEnglish Heritage at Wildwood Terrace, Pevsner's home since 1936.[39][36]
In 1984, theGetty Research Institute inLos Angeles acquired the Nikolaus Pevsner Papers,[40] an archive that includes 143 boxes of typed and handwritten notes, clippings, photographs, books, lecture notes, and manuscripts.
Research notes by Pevsner (and other editors) for theBuildings of England series are held in theHistoric England Archive inSwindon.[41]
Review ofPevsner – the Early Life, by Stephen Games
includes "An appreciation of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner", by John Newman)
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