Nikolaus Pevsner

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Pevsner, Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon (1902-83). A German-born art historian, Pevsner came to Britain in 1934 as a refugee from Nazism. He wrote widely on art and architecture, was a founder member of the William Morris and Victorian societies, and Slade professor of fine art at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as professor of the history of art at Birkbeck College, London. Of his many publications, including the Pelican History of Art (begun 1953), the best known is The Buildings of England, which he began in 1949 and worked on for 21 years.

Born in Leipzig, Germany, architectural and design historian Nikolaus Pevsner studied at the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt, gaining his doctorate on Leipzig baroque houses in 1924. In 1926 he joined the Dresden Art Gallery until 1928, when he took up a post at Göttingen University. He developed an interest in English art and architecture, visiting Britain for the first time in 1930. In the face of political upheaval in Germany Pevsner moved to England in 1933, coming into contact with Philip Sargent Florence of Birmingham University, who suggested that he should investigate contemporary English industrial design. This resulted in his book An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (1937). (At this time he was also a buyer of textiles and glass for Gordon Russell Ltd.). However, the book with which he has been most associated in terms of design was his 1936 volume on Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. Subsequently it has undergone many reprints, and several editions, and has been translated into many languages. For many decades it has provided a focal point for debates about the nature and practice of design history which, by the later 1970s, moved away from the Pevsnerian emphasis on Modernism and its origins in the 19th-century design reform movement. His account was largely predicated on the artistic creativity of well-known individuals and a shift away from historicism and ‘gratuitous’ ornamentation towards an emphatically 20th-century ‘Machine Age’ outlook. Such an outlook was challenged increasingly by others who placed greater emphasis on the wider social, economic, political, and technological climate in which design is manufactured and used. After a brief period of internment in 1940 the Architectural Press employed Pevsner before, from 1942 to 1945, he became editor of the Architectural Review, a periodical which since the late 1920s had been sympathetic to the Modernist cause. From 1942 until his retirement in 1969 he was employed by Birkbeck College, University of London, and was appointed as professor in the History of Art in 1959. Other writings reflecting an interest in design matters included Visual Pleasures in Everyday Things (1946), High Victorian Design (1951), and Sources of Modern Art (1964, republished as Sources of Modern Architecture and Design in 1968). Pevsner is perhaps best known today as an architectural historian, his many publications in this genre including An Outline of European Architecture (1942), The Buildings of England series (1951 onwards), Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (1972), and A History of Building Types (1976). He held several prestigious posts including the Slade Professorships in Fine Art at Cambridge (1949-55) and Oxford (1968-9) and was also an influential figure on many important committees including the Fine Art Commission, the Historic Buildings Council, and the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design. He was a founding member of the Victorian Society, taking on the role of chair from 1958 to 1976. Amongst the many awards he received were the CBE (1953) and the Royal Institute of British Architects Royal Gold Medal for architecture. He was knighted in 1969 for ‘services to art and architecture’.

German-born British art-historian. He was a strong supporter of the Modern Movement, which gave some of his early writings an undoubted bias, notably the very influential Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936, later reissued as Pioneers of Modern Design) and the enormously successful (and again influential) An Outline of European Architecture (1942 with many subsequent editions). He had a powerful impact on the Architectural Review) in the 1940s, when it became a pro-Modern-Movement force, and changed the architectural climate of Britain. He originated and edited the Pelican History of Art (from 1953), one of the most impressive series on art and architecture published in C20. His greatest achievement was arguably the county-by-county guides of The Buildings of England (from 1951), much of which he wrote himself, although some of his highly subjective comments have been toned down in later editions. His distinguished collections of essays and papers published as Studies in Art, Architecture, and Design (1968) and A History of Building Types (1976) are mines of information. He was devoted to the study of the architecture (especially churches) of his adopted country, and made an incalculable contribution to scholarship. However, the notions he imbibed while a student at Leipzig (especially influenced by his teacher, Georg Maximilian Wilhelm Pinder (1878–1947—who was much respected by the National Socialists, not least for his over-estimation of German art in relation to other European countries) ), including his beliefs in the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) and in ‘national character’, led him to presuppositions that perhaps distorted his sense of history. For example, he argued that among Gropius's architectural antecedents were members of the English Arts-and-Crafts Movement: this was typical of his attempts to create links with the past to promote his own heroes, for it is well-known that Arts-and-Crafts architects (e.g. Baillie Scott and Voysey) rejected Gropius and all he stood for. Gropius and his disciples did much to destroy traditional crafts-based building (despite Gropius's insistence (to Pevsner) that William Morris was one of his main sources of inspiration). Nevertheless, his many immense achievements deserve respect.

Bibliography

• Bradley & B. Cherry (2001)
• B. Cherry (1998)
• Draper (ed.) (2004)
• Games (ed.) (2002)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
• Pevsner (1960, 1963, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1974, 1974a, 1976)
• Jane Turner (1996)
• D.Watkin (1977)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)

Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, CBE, (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-born British scholar of history of art and, especially, of history of architecture. He is best known for his 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951–74).

Contents 1 Life 2 Papers 3 Notable ideas and theories 4 Selected bibliography 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

Life

The son of a Jewish merchant, Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony. He studied art history at the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt/Main in Germany (PhD 1924), worked at the Dresden Gallery (1924–28) and taught at the University of Göttingen (1929–33). According to Games (2002), he was an admirer of some of the economic policies of the early Hitler regime, but was caught up in the ban on Jews being employed by the Nazi state shortly after Hitler's accession to power and was required to step down from Göttingen in May 1933. Later that year he moved to England where friends found him a research post at the University of Birmingham.^[1] In the early 1940s he joined the academic staff at Birkbeck College, University of London, becoming a professor, and was later a visiting lecturer at both the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford. He assumed British citizenship in 1946.

After moving to England, Pevsner 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. He conceived a project to write a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this, and gained the backing of Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, for whom he had written his Outline of European Architecture. Work on the Buildings 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 4 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 title Pevsner Architectural Guides. As well as The Buildings of England, Pevsner conceived and edited the Pelican History of Art series (1953–), many individual volumes of which are regarded as classics.

In 1946 Pevsner made his first of several broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme, presenting nine talks in all up to 1950, examining painters and European art eras. Pevsner continued to broadcast on the BBC, and by 1977 had presented more than 78 talks including for the Reith Lectures in 1955 ("The Englishness of English Art").^[2]

He was Slade Professor at Cambridge (1949-1955).^[2] In 1958, Pevsner was invited to become founder chairman of The Victorian Society, the national charity for the study and protection and Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts. He was also an early active member of the Georgian Group founded in 1937. He was granted the CBE in 1953 and was knighted in 1969.

He died in London in 1983 and his memorial service was held at the Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury the following December.

Papers

Research papers and correspondence relating to Pevsner's first job in a British university, after leaving Germany, can be found at the University of Birmingham Special Collections but are as yet uncatalogued. A substantial collection of his papers is held at the Pevsner archive in the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Nikolaus Pevsner papers, 1919-1979. Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

Notable ideas and theories

• "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal." From An Outline of European Architecture, 1943.
• Pevsner also described the three ways aesthetic appeal could manifest itself in architecture: in a building's façade, the material volumes or the interior.

Selected bibliography

• Academies of Art, Past and Present (1940)
• An Outline of European Architecture (1943)
• Pioneers of Modern Design (1949; originally published in 1936 under the title Pioneers of the Modern Movement)
• The Buildings of England (1951-74)
• The Englishness of English Art (1956)
• The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (1968)
• A History of Building Types (1976)
• Pevsner on Art and Architecture: the Radio Talks, edited and introduced by Stephen Games, (Methuen, 2003)

Notes

1. ^ BUZZ (2005)
2. ^ ^{a b} "Sorensen, Lee. "Nikolaus Pevsner": Dictionary of Art Historians". http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/pevsnern.htm. Retrieved 2009-05-23. 

References

• BUZZ (2005) A landlady in a million?, Snapshots of days gone by, Online newsletter 57, University of Birmingham, p. 10 accessed August 1, 2007.
• Games, Stephen (2002) Pevsner the German, Lecture at Heffers Bookshop, Cambridge December 2, accessed August 1, 2007.

External links

• Pevsner Architectural Guides
• The Victorian Society
• Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983)
• Pevsner Art Catalogue Collection

Persondata
NAME	Pevsner, Nikolaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Scholar of art history and architecture
DATE OF BIRTH	30 January 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH	Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	18 August 1983
PLACE OF DEATH	London, England

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