Nikolaus Pevsner

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Nikolaus Pevsner bigraphy, stories - Scholar of art history and architecture

Nikolaus Pevsner : biography

30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983

Sir Nikolaus (Bernhard Leon) Pevsner CBE FBA (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), often simply referred to as "Pevsner".

Life

The son of a Jewish fur haulier, Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony. He studied art history at the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt/Main, completing a PhD in 1924 on the baroque merchant houses of Leipzig. In 1923 he married Carola (‘Lola’) Kurlbaum, the daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum, one year earlier than they had planned after she had become pregnant by him. He worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery (1924–28). During this period he became interested in establishing the supremacy of German modernist architecture after becoming aware of Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1925. In 1928 he contributed the volume on Italian baroque painting to the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, a multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art. He taught at the University of Göttingen (1929–33), offering a specialist course on English art and architecture.

According to Stephen Games’s biography and an earlier summary in Games’s introduction to Pevsner on Art and Architecture: the Radio Talks, Pevsner welcomed many of the economic and cultural 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 late 1933. Later that year he moved to England. His first post was an eighteen-month research fellowship at the University of Birmingham, found for him by friends in Birmingham and partly funded by the Academic Assistance Council. 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 as An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge University Press, 1937). He was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for the Gordon Russell furniture showrooms in London.

By this time he had also completed Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, his influential pre-history of what he saw as Walter Gropius’s 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 twentieth-century architecture; in England, however, it was widely taken to be the history of England’s contribution to international modernism, and a manifesto for Bauhaus (i.e. Weimar) modernism, which it was not. 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 by Faber & Faber in 1936, it has gone through several editions and been translated into many languages. The English-language edition has also been renamed Pioneers of Modern Design.

Second World War

Pevsner was "more German than the Germans" to the extent that he supported "Goebbels in his drive for ‘pure’ non-decadent German art". He was reported as saying of the Nazis (in 1933) "I want this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos… There are things worse than Hitlerism". Nonetheless he was included in the Nazi Black Book as hostile to the Hitler regime.

In 1940, Pevsner was interned as an enemy alien in Huyton, Liverpool. He was released after three months on the intervention of, among others, Frank Pick, then Director-General of the Ministry of Information. He spent some time in the months after the Blitz clearing bomb debris, and wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information’s Die Zeitung, an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England. He also completed for Penguin Books the Pelican paperback An Outline of European Architecture, which he had begun to develop while in internment. Outline would eventually go into seven editions, be translated into sixteen languages, and sell more than half a million copies.