Nickolaus Pevsner

Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (1951–74).

Life

Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony, the son of Anna and her husband Hugo Pevsner, a Russian-Jewish fur merchant. He attended St. Thomas School, Leipzig, and went on to study at several universities, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt am Main, before being awarded a doctorate by Leipzig in 1924 for a thesis on the Baroque architecture of Leipzig. In 1923, he married Carola ("Lola") Kurlbaum, the daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum. He worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928. He converted from Judaism to Lutheranism early in his life.

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 between 1929 and 1933, offering a specialist course on English art and architecture.

According to biographers Stephen Games and Susie Harries, Pevsner welcomed many of the economic and cultural policies of the early Hitler regime. However, due to Nazi 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 in Hampstead, where poet Geoffrey Grigson was his next-door neighbour in Wildwood Terrace. Pevsner's first post was an 18-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 Pevsner 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' 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 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." 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 book ''Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life''. For example, the following observation is made by Pevsner on the boat to Dover in October 1933: "The second-class is almost entirely occupied by non-Aryans. Dreadful, dreadful – to think that's where I belong." Nonetheless, he was included in the Nazi Black Book as someone hostile to the Hitler regime.

In 1940, Pevsner was taken to the internment camp at Huyton, Liverpool as an enemy alien. Geoffrey Grigson later wrote in his ''Recollections'' (1984): "When at last two hard-faced Bow Street runners arrived in the early hours of the morning to take im... 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, of Shakespeare's Sonnets." Pevsner 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 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 16 languages, and sell more than half a million copies.

In 1942, Pevsner finally secured two regular positions. From 1936 onwards he had been a frequent contributor to the ''Architectural Review'' and from 1943 to 1945 he stood in as its acting editor while the regular editor J. M. Richards was on active service. Under the ''AR''s influence, Pevsner's approach to modern architecture became more complex and more moderate. Early signs of a lifelong interest in Victorian architecture, also influenced by the ''Architectural 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 the ''Review''s proprietor, H. de C. Hastings, in evolving the magazine's theories on picturesque planning.

In 1942, Pevsner was also appointed a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck College, London; he would eventually retire from the college in 1969 as its first Professor of Art History. He lectured at Cambridge University for almost 30 years, having been Slade Professor of Fine Art there for a record six years from 1949 to 1955, and was also the Slade Professor at Oxford in 1968.

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 by Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books