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Slide 1 Home page
‘Nikolaus Pevsner - Bringer of Riches: a life' by Susie Harries
Forthcoming from Chatto and Windus
Bringer of Riches is the definitive biography of Nikolaus Pevsner, begetter of The Buildings of England. It draws on the diaries he kept all his life and a vast store of family letters as well as the professional correspondence of an astonishing career in both Germany and England.
The site has seven sections –
Summary
Extracts
Topics
External Links
Contact
Blog
Photography
The topics are:
Pevsner’s diaries
Pevsner’s politics
Pevsner and Jewishness
Pevsner and Englishness
Pevsner’s Buildings
Pevsner and the Victorians
Pevsner’s pseudonyms
Pevsner and 20th-century architecture
Pevsner’s allies and critics
Two quotations:
‘This is how I am, this is my background. And this is what I love in people – everything I am not’. Nikolaus Pevsner, Leipzig, 1918
‘Pevsner has been a bringer of riches, the entertainment, the wisdom of architectural scholarship to more people probably than any man alive’. John Summerson, London, 1967
Images
There is one image – a black and white photograph of Pevsner in the 1950s, a cigarette in the hand that supports his forehead
Slide 2 Summary
‘A bringer of riches, the entertainment, the wisdom of architectural scholarship to more people probably than any man alive’ – Bringer of Riches opens with the small ‘Nikolai Pewsner’ growing up in a Russian-Jewish family in the Kaiser’s Germany and closes in Hampstead with ‘Sir Nikolaus’, seeming pillar of the British establishment. It is a story of aspirations thwarted and unexpected success. Pevsner failed to become what he wanted and expected to be. What he became instead was altogether more remarkable.
Childhood in Leipzig, an adolescence dominated by a passion for Lola and his confused ambitions to be an artist; a promising career as a young academic in Dresden in Göttingen during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic, dislocated by the rise of Hitler: the book illuminates Pevsner’s German years and the events leading to his move to England in 1933. It explores the truth about his sympathies with elements of Nazi thought before describing his internment in England as an enemy alien, his mother’s suicide in a Leipzig ‘Jews’ House’, and his own return to occupied Germany in 1946 in a British uniform.
Alongside a miscellany of odd jobs – teaching Italian to debutantes at the Courtauld, buying cutlery and carpeting for the Gordon Russell showroom – Pevsner’s research into industrial design in Birmingham made him a reluctant pioneer in design history. Bringer of Riches describes his struggle to find a foothold in art history and his relations with the English inner circle – Blunt, Clark, Pope-Hennessy – and the academic refugees who were transforming the discipline.
Pevsner’s involvement in the Penguin post-war campaign for popular education would lead him from King Penguins to his best-selling Outline of European Architecture and on to the odyssey that was The Buildings of England. (more)
Images
There are three images:
Pevsner aged 6 in a sailor suit
Pevsner on skates with his small daughter
Pevsner in the uniform of a British major in occupied Germany in 1946
Slide 3 Summary (continued)
Pevsner would become a key figure in the evolution of the conservation movement, primarily as a champion of Victorian architecture. At the same time he was cast, sometimes against his will, as both spokesman and scapegoat for modernist architecture, bringing him in the last years of his life within range of a sharp revisionist backlash.
This is the story of the man as much as the work. Bringer of Riches explores Pevsner’s religious beliefs – the conversion from Judaism to Lutheranism and his uneasy relationship with High Church Anglicanism – his political beliefs (or lack of them), and his long, complicated, resilient marriage.
Through his notorious Reith lectures, Pevsner would be an early leader in the attempt to define ‘Englishness’ , but he would always be a prime target for professional Englishmen who liked to deride the ‘Herr Professor Doktor’. Bringer of Riches seeks to dismantle the stereotype of the dour, moralising Teutonic workaholic. Through the eyes of Pevsner’s family, students, colleagues , friends and foes and, above all, using his own words, it reveals a vulnerable and inconsistent man, with a romantic streak and an emotional, humorous, provocative private voice.
As a ‘General Practitioner’ of architectural history, Pevsner explored an astonishing range of subjects from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee-houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks:. His career is a prism through which to view the evolution of art history in Britain – while his life as an outsider/insider at the heart of English art history illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so much to shape post-war British culture.
Images
There is one image, of Pevsner in the 1930s – taken in a public booth, looking ill at ease in a tweed suit
Slide 4 Extracts title page
This page lists seven extracts from the book:
Introduction – ‘This is who I am’
Pevsner in Birmingham
Internee 54829
Travelling for the Buildings of England
Pevsner perambulating
Pevsner and Betjeman
Morality and architecture
Images
There are three images:
Pevsner at the age of ten, on a piebald pony, in knickerbockers and a ‘baker’s boy’ cap
Pevsner in the 1950s, in Homburg hat and tweed jacket, standing by the open door of a Volkswagen in the middle of the countryside
Pevsner sitting at the breakfast table in the window of his cottage in Wiltshire in the 1960s
Slide 5 Extract 1 Introduction – ‘This is who I am’
The boy labouring over the diaries had a very clear picture of his ideal. “I really belong in a strict civil service family,” he wrote. He longed to be ordinary, simple, disciplined, Prussian and respectable – and felt himself to fail on all counts.
His family was exotic, opulent and artistic where he wanted it to be solid and austere, its cultivation firmly rooted in tradition; and he himself was too complex, too knowing, too dark. “The image that I have of myself in later life”, he wrote gloomily, “is very vague and not at all good.”
Even his name was wrong in his eyes. At birth it was not Nikolaus (a good German name) but the Russian Nikolai – invariably shortened by family and friends to ‘Nika’ – and not Pevsner but Pewsner, both derived from ‘Posener’, the label of the Posen Jew.
Images
There is one image, of Pevsner as a teenager, smartly dressed in suit and tie
Slide 6 Extract 2 Pevsner in Birmingham
“To stick it out and not lose heart, not lose my grip ... to keep on the ball, a pleasant, competent man – not to lose patience or one’s edge, not to miss a trick.” To the outside observer, Pevsner successfully projected the image of a charming young man, urbane, suave, keen to make himself agreeable. But underneath the smooth exterior he was edgy, aware of constant compromise and dissembling. “This damned hypocrisy is becoming harder and harder.”
Lola had reproached him for adapting too easily to English ways, a charge he angrily rejected. He only wanted to succeed in England in order that they might live as much like Germans as they wanted. Sitting outside on a July evening, reading the Gospels, he was pierced with anguish when a fellow lodger put on a record of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to accompany her supper. “While I was sitting in the garden, looking at the big trees, there it was again suddenly – memories of Nikisch and the Gewandhaus. Surely this can’t be true – that all of that should be the past and that Birmingham should be the present, and more than just an episode ?”
Images
There is one image – of Pevsner in 1934 as a lodger in Birmingham, sitting in a deck chair in the garden of his landlady’s house in Edgbaston
Slide 7 Extract 3 Internee 52849
Pevsner had brought papers and notes into Huyton with him in order to continue some research into the status of the architect in the Middle Ages. Soon, however, he was able to tell Lola that he was “actually pottering about with something of wider appeal, to help in the new start” – ‘wider appeal’ being something of an understatement. .... “He was working,” Ralph Beyer remembered later. “He said to me that he thought there wasn’t a short history in English of European architecture, so he’d do that.”
In the intervals, there were entertainments on offer. He was not tempted by the games of volleyball and football that were improvised, but he read novels – Kenilworth kept him going for some time – supplemented ordinary meals with apples and Marmite bought from the camp shop, went to the occasional play staged by inmates, and listened to music. “‘The everyday situation here is so gruesomely normal,” Pevsner complained. “There is the odd good hour. What everyone suppresses, which is more tragic, is immeasurable. I hope I will not forget all this.”
Images
There are two images:
A passport photo of 1946, showing internee Pevsner in dark double-breasted suit and wire-rimmed glasses
A shot of Huyton internment camp, with internees stuffing palliasses with straw for their bedding. Photo: Getty Images
Slide 8 Extract 4 Travelling for The Buildings of England
The human side of Pevsner on the road is documented in painful detail in the letters he wrote during his travels, or travails, through Nottinghamshire – and, indirectly, in the final text, which reflects his tribulations. Lola, for some reason, was unable to accompany him, and this would be the only county which he would cover entirely on his own, playing the parts of driver, leader and assistant. The volume would be dedicated ‘to the driver, who gave satisfaction’; but this was something of an exaggeration.
Pevsner had no aptitude whatsoever as a driver. Bertschy Grigson remembered him taking, and failing, his test so often that the driving school was embarrassed into offering him a discount. On August 3rd 1948 he took his test: ‘‘Tired, washed out, deflated, dizzy (only three whiskies) and not a bit happy,” he reported to Lola .”My only reaction at the moment is intense hatred against my car.” (more)
Images
There are two images:
An open church door, showing a distant view of nave and altar (by permission of Joep Roosen)
A green 1932 Wolseley Hornet, the first car in which Pevsner travelled for the series
Slide 9 Extract 4 Travelling for the Buildings of England (continued)
Over the first week, his life assumed a pattern of a kind, relieved by small diversions – listening to the Proms on hotel radios, going for a modest half-pint of Bass to relax from his labours, reading Anna Karenina when he finally went to bed. Food was a duty rather than a pleasure. The sandwiches he had bought in London had lasted him a week – including those with Camembert “of which everything smells”. “New rations bought today. I’m saving sugar and points. I’ll eat raw bacon too. Good stuff. And I’m eating churches.”
No passing irritations or despondencies could stop him appreciating Southwell Minster anew, and there were many small architectural pleasures. But grumbling is never far away, and some recurring Pevsnerian bêtes noires make their first appearance in Nottinghamshire.... Pevsner’s best defence against the charge of blandness is the amount of toning down which those in charge of later editions would feel necessary.
Images
There are two images:
The black and white roundel drawing for the cover of the first edition of Nottinghamshire, Penguin, 1951 ( by permission of the Pevsner Architectural Guides)
The brown paperback cover of that first edition of Nottinghamshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides)
Slide 10 Extract 5 Pevsner perambulating
“BERWICK ON TWEED. Berwick is one of the most exciting towns in England, a real town with the strongest sense of enclosure, a town of red roofs on grey houses with hardly any irritating buildings anywhere, and a town of the most intricate changes of levels....A walk through Berwick ought to start by the Town Hall. It faces up Marygate .…The principal walk turns off Marygate down WEST STREET. The steep descent of West Street marks the change from the high town level of the Town Hall and the new bridge to the lower level of the old bridge .… It is enjoyable to dive down Palace Street to Palace Green … right into the lowest level. PALACE GREEN is a delicious oasis of old dark trees surrounded by buildings of dignity. On the E side the former GOVERNOR’S HOUSE, characteristically early C18 .…No. 9 on the S side has a coloured bust of Wellington over the doorway. On into PALACE STREET EAST which … forms the Georgian Mayfair of Berwick .… In RAVENSDOWNE nearly all houses are worth a glance. The stepped skyline of the street rising gently to the upper or Town Hall level is very pretty.”
Images
There are seven images arranged around the text to illustrate Pevsner’s perambulation through Berwick-upon-Tweed:
Rooftops of Berwick (copyright David Tait)
An old sign reading ‘Foot passengers keep to the right’ (copyright David Tait)
A flight of broad, worn grey stone steps leading from the upper town to the lower (by permission of imagesaurus)
A shot down West Street (copyright David Tait)
A misty corner of Berwick (by permission of Cathie Tinn)
The Old Bridge, Berwick (by permission of Anne Gallacher)
Ravensdowne, Berwick (by permission of Trevor Weddell)
Slide 11 Extract 6 Pevsner and Betjeman
Much has been made of the Pevsner/Betjeman discord by observers who enjoy other people’s fights.... Pevsner became well aware of Betjeman’s dislike of him – he could scarcely have missed it – but he never returned it with any sustained ill will of his own. ‘Vendetta’ would be a more accurate description, and this vendetta was one of a string which Betjeman made part of his public persona.
Betjeman made his dislike of Pevsner a conversational leitmotif and used it, like his other vendettas, as a channel for a complex of other emotions – insecurity, disappointment, fear, envy – as well as to express some of his fundamental attitudes towards art, architecture and religion.
The two men were temperamentally poles apart, they approached art and architecture from different directions, and, in the mind of one of them at least, there were professional rivalries between them. But the degree of venom with which Betjeman expressed his detestation of Pevsner was startling, and the roots of his rancour lay below aesthetic differences of opinion or professional jealousies, inextricably tangled with some of his most profound convictions and apprehensions.
Images
There is one image – a rear view of the head of the statue of John Betjeman in St Pancras station (by permission of Carl David)
Slide 12 Extract 7 Morality and Architecture
It is not unreasonable to suggest that Pevsner’s creed was less a developed and coherent philosophy than an assemblage of faiths. Pevsner himself had admitted in his RIBA Gold Medal speech, “I know I am deplorably unphilosophical”. He had, after all, once described work as an escape from philosophy....
But if Pevsner was writing from emotion as much as cold reason, so too was Watkin. Morality and Architecture is, in its tactics and techniques, more of a polemic than anything Pevsner ever wrote. As a tract, it works through generalisation, selectivity, misrepresentation, and guilt by association, and its argument is politicised beyond anything that Pevsner ever contemplated.
Images
There is one image – the outstretched human figure from Vitruvius’ theories of beauty (by permission of the British Library)
Slide 13 Topics title page
This page lists the nine topics discussed:
Pevsner’s diaries
Pevsner’s politics
Pevsner and Jewishness
Pevsner and Englishness
Pevsner‘s Buildings
Pevsner and the Victorians
Pevsner’s pseudonyms
Pevsner and the 20th century
Pevsner’s allies and critics
Images
There are four images:
Pevsner as a student
Pevsner abroad, outside a modern block of flats contemplating a contemporary metal sculpture
Pevsner with his wife Lola
Pevsner in South Africa in the 1960s
Slide 14 Topic 1 Pevsner’s diaries
Pevsner kept diaries – little blue volumes that he called his Heftchen, or exercise books – for more than sixty years. He would ultimately destroy dozens of the Heftchen as part of a promise he had made to his wife.
But those that remain – all handwritten, most in German, some in a shorthand of his own devising – are an extraordinary record of a personality, astonishingly detailed and yet incomplete, authoritative and inconsistent, pedantic and passionate, analytical and unreasonable.
Images
There are three images:
Pevsner the diary-keeper, in his late teens
The frontispiece to a diary of 1917
A double page spread from a diary of 1918, including a photograph of Pevsner and two girls
Slide 15 Topic 1 Pevsner’s diaries (continued) – Excerpts from the Heftchen
‘February 14, 1918. P goes to the Gewandhaus; he dresses up rather more à la bohème …. He brings his score, takes his seat …. He waits for the beginning of Leonora III, hears the first notes, glances for a moment to his left and, while the music swells, catches sight of a shadowed brow with a lock of dark hair falling over it. A violent shock runs through him – Lola ! Lola! ‘
1921 ‘Pathetic – P lacks a feeling for space and, with that, all sense of the distinctive characteristics of buildings. I can hardly believe this is something that can be learnt. What is more, he has a very under-developed memory for form and colour – can’t remember a thing, so he is always quite incapable of drawing comparisons .’
1969 ‘It is time for the Buildings of England to come to an end. I am more and more frightened of county after county. Restless for days before. If all goes well, another 13 months should do it .... But will they be available? I think more often of death, of the few years remaining. 20 years back seems little, and there is no 20 years forward.’
Images
There are two images:
Pevsner à la bohème – in a loose smock
An elderly-looking Pevsner in hat and raincoat on a riverside bench, in the 1960s
Slide 16 Topic 2 Pevsner’s politics
Pevsner never had any practical political involvement, never belonged to any political party. However, he had deep-rooted ideas on national spirit, on Germany, on art, on society, on the artist’s role in society, all of which had significant political implications.
As an adolescent he held vague right-wing views, loosely centred on Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Non-political Man. His creed was partly a reaction against his mother’s liberalism but it was also a means of expressing his emotional response to the art of the German Middle Ages. For him, the sculptures in the cathedral at Naumburg perfectly expressed Germanness- spiritual fervour within a framework of responsibility and discipline.
He was then strongly influenced by his Leipzig tutor, Wilhelm Pinder, a passionate German nationalist. Pinder saw German art as the core of Western culture and wanted to see Germany as the political hub of Europe, with a society shaped by the ideals of the Middle Ages. (more)
Images
There are two images:
The statues of the Margrave Eckhart and his wife Uta in Naumburg Cathedral (photo from AICT/Allan T. Kohl)
Thomas Mann (photo by Carl Van Vechten, used from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons licence)
Slide 17 Topic 2 Pevsner’s politics (continued)
Pinder would become a member of the Nazi party and broadcast for the regime. Elements in Pevsner’s thinking, too, could be perverted into some of the tenets of Nazism: veneration of the ‘Naumburg spirit’, reverence for Germanness; revulsion from the mess and disorder of the Weimar republic, dislike of materialism and, above all, his belief that artists should be servants of their times and communities.
In the early 1930s in Göttingen Pevsner engaged in what he called ‘culture-politics’, possibly trying to secure a place within the Nazi art establishment, or perhaps aiming to promote his own ideas by lodging them in a Nazi context. Either way, he failed. Having been forced from his job, in his first uncertain years in England he was still inclined to defend the regime. But as its philistinism and repressiveness became clearer his sympathy was reduced to a personal loyalty to Pinder, to whom he would persist in dedicating his Academies of Art as late as 1940. This was despite the fact that he himself had been denounced by the Nazis for ‘art Bolshevism’ and included in their ‘Black Book’ listing enemies of the regime, to be seized when England was invaded. Pevsner may have been involved in smuggling dissidents out of Germany. He certainly wrote pieces denouncing Nazi art and architecture, and he was among the first to be employed by the Ministry of Information in London to write anti-Nazi propaganda aimed at Germans in Britain.
Images
There are two images:
A cartoon from the German magazine Simplicissimus from the hyper-inflation period of the Weimar Republic showing Gutenberg gazing in horror at his printing press pouring out countless banknotes, with the caption ‘This is not what I had in mind’
Senate House, London, home of the wartime Ministry of Information (photo: Secret Pilgrim)
Slide 18 Topic 3 Pevsner and Jewishness
Both Pevsner’s parents were Jewish, and as a boy he learned Hebrew in preparation for becoming Bar Mitzvah, but the family were not practising Jews. Largely for practical reasons, Hugo Pevsner had converted to Lutheranism by the time his son was born. Pevsner did not feel Jewish, nor, in his anxiety to be accepted as a ‘true German’ , did he want to be a Jew. Lola’s family, though half-Jewish, was successfully assimilated and at least partly for her sake, Pevsner himself converted to Lutheranism after they were engaged. Their wedding was held neither in synagogue nor church, but in their Leipzig flat.
Nonetheless, however German he may have felt, under the Nazi race laws Pevsner lost the right to work in his homeland. His children, on holiday in Germany in the summer of 1939, were almost trapped: the boys escaped from Jutland on a Danish fishing freighter, while his daughter spent the war in hiding with her aunt’s family in Hanover. Despite Pevsner’s best efforts to bring his parents to England, they felt unable to deny their Jewish roots and feared the upheaval of a move .After his father’s death, his mother was moved to a series of ‘Jews’ Houses’ in Leipzig. In January 1942, under threat of transportation, she committed suicide.
Images
There are two images:
A Star of David in stained glass from the Eldridge Street synagogue, New York (by permission of Gaby Gollub)
The cross and crown of thorns from Coventry Cathedral (Photo: rasok¬_19)
Slide 19 Topic 4 Pevsner and Englishness
Pevsner was reared as an art historian on the idea of national character in art. He was then required to specialise in English art while still lecturing in Göttingen, and first came to England in 1930 to gather background material: ‘Englishness, of course, is the purpose of my trip,’ he told his wife.
By the time he was asked to propose a topic for the Reith Lectures of 1955, he had already written articles for both German and English newspapers on typically English characteristics: humour, reliability, matter-of-factness, informality, tolerance and adaptability, naturalism, rationality, close observation of everyday life and reticence in the expression of sensibility, fantasy or religious feeling.
These qualities he found in English art and architecture – Hogarth, Reynolds, Constable, Perpendicular parish churches and the ‘imposed geometry’ of Blake and Soane , medieval carving and the Picturesque garden planning of the 18th century.
(more)
Images
There are two images:
Pevsner at the microphone, delivering his Reith Lectures in 1955
The cover of the Penguin edition of The Englishness of English Art
Slide 20 Topic 4 Pevsner and Englishness (continued)
Pevsner was not attempting to prescribe how the English should build or carve or paint : ‘Why should I, with a never-fully-conquered foreign intonation, I who am not too certain of the difference between a centre forward and a leg volley, stand here to talk to you about the Englishness of English art?’ But he suggested that the interloper may have a clearer view: ‘In order to see clearly what’s what in national character, it is perhaps a good thing at one stage to have come in from outside and then to have settled down to become part of it.’
However far he had settled in since 1934, the Reith lectures had the effect for many of turning him back into an outsider again. ‘I have heard it suggested,’ remarked ‘Pharos’ in the Spectator, ‘that Dr Pevsner’s Reith lectures on “The Englishness of English Art” should properly be entitled “Die Englischheit der Englischen Kunst”.’
Images
There are four images:
Tracery from the north transept of St Mary’s Church, Witney (by permission of Martin Beek)
A carved wooden misericord from Holy Trinity Church, Stratford upon Avon (by permission of Christopher Levy)
One gallery of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (by permission of Lewis K. Bush)
A rooftop view of Chatsworth House and gardens (by permission of James Booth)
Slide 21 Topic 5 Pevsner’s Buildings
On Pevsner’s first visit to England in 1930, he looked in vain for the kind of architectural guide he wanted and would have found in Germany. Fifteen years later, given the chance by Allen Lane and Penguin Books, he decided to write one for himself.
If he had anticipated the level of exposure and scrutiny the 46 volumes would receive, he might have defined more clearly what his objective was. Pevsner’s Buildings of England were guides primarily to the formal stylistic characteristics of buildings, not their social context nor the life histories of their builders or owners, nor even the details of their construction. The main aim of the series was to inform, not to evoke atmosphere – to tell people what they were looking at, rather than how they should feel about it.
The function of the books determined their form, laid out as a gazetteer rather than a narrative, and their style , terse and telegraphic, stronger on adjectives than verbs.
(more)
Images
There are three images:
The black and white roundel for the cover of the 1st edition of Cambridgeshire, 1954 (Pevsner Architectural Guides)
The cover of the first hardback edition of Northumberland, 1957 (Pevsner Architectural Guides)
Pevsner stretched out on the grass reading his notes and eating sandwiches
Slide 22 Topic 5 Pevsner’s Buildings (continued)
The 46 counties took 25 years to complete, and the series became a burden for Pevsner quite early on. To finish required superhuman application and a certain imperviousness to criticism. Where readers found factual errors, he was anxious to correct them, but the methodology he had adopted left him unable to do much about those who found his style too dry, and unwilling to bow to those who resented his championing of modernism wherever he found traces of it.
His aim was more to publicise than to prescribe; but ‘Is it in Pevsner?’ quickly became a yardstick for measuring architectural worth, invaluable to the conservationist and an asset for the estate agent. As Pevsner intended, The Buildings of England has provided a framework on which others can build, the bare bones which they can clothe as they choose.
The Buildings also continue along their original lines. Now known as the Pevsner Architectural Guides and published by Yale University Press, with additional volumes covering Wales, Scotland and Ireland, a continuing programme of new editions keeps the series up-to-date with new information on older buildings and recent architecture.
Images
There are six images:
Cover of the 1st edition of Bedfordshire, Huntingdon and Peterborough, 1968. (Pevsner Architectural Guides)
Cover of the 2nd edition of Northamptonshire, revised by Bridget Cherry, 1974. (Pevsner Architectural Guides)
Cover of the 2nd edition of Cambridgeshire, with Enid Radcliffe, 1970. (Pevsner Architectural Guides)
The black and white roundel for the cover of the 1st edition of Buckinghamshire, 1960. (Pevsner Architectural Guides)
The format for the Buildings of England in an excerpt from Warwickshire. (Buildings Books Trust)
Pevsner at the end of the series, walking away from the Old Rectory, St Luke’s Church, Sheen, Staffordshire
Slide 23 Topic 6 Pevsner and the Victorians
Pevsner first took an interest in the Victorian era not for itself but for those Victorians who seemed to point forward to a later age. He was attracted to it primarily as a period that had been neglected – ‘the obscurest age since 1066’.
He deplored some of its characteristics – the fondness for borrowing styles from other eras, the sham materials, the vulgarity – but found others hard to resist: the gusto, tenacity, edginess and constant thirst for information. Intrigued by extremes, he enjoyed writing about his villains as well as his heroes, Teulon and Lamb as well as Pearson and Street.
He was entertained by Victorian building, but he also took it seriously when many others did not. By insisting on including it in The Buildings of England and putting his academic weight behind campaigns to publicise and preserve it, he encouraged others to take it seriously – not just other scholars, but architects, planners and civil servants.
(more)
Images
There are seven images:
St James the Less, Westminster, by G.E. Street. (Photo: Jacqueline Banerjee, for VictorianWeb)
Copper repoussé panel by Arthur Mackmurdo. (Photo: George P. Landow, for VictorianWeb)
Designs for a house at Oxshott by C.A. Voysey. (Photo: George P. Landow for VictorianWeb)
Drawing of Quar Wood, Gloucestershire by J.L. Pearson. (Photo: George P. Landow for VictorianWeb)
Engraving of the Euston Arch by Philip Hardwick. (Photo: George P. Landow for VictorianWeb)
Pump House, Albert Dock, Liverpool. (Photo; Jacqueline Banerjee for VictorianWeb)
The Hereford Screen by G. G. Scott. (Photo: Library of Congress by way of VictorianWeb)
Slide 24 Topic 6 Pevsner and the Victorians (continued)
Victorian architecture, Pevsner believed, should be valued and preserved primarily as the most powerful expression of the spirit of its age. A founder member of the Victorian Society, he was its Chairman during its formative years, and fought alongside John Betjeman, Hugh Casson and others to save houses, churches, hospitals, mills, railway stations and other monuments to an age of industry and national pride.
He often disagreed with his fellows. In his eyes, a good modern building might sometimes be preferable to a mediocre old one, and it was better for a building to be dismantled and lovingly re-erected in Wisconsin than to moulder in Wiltshire.But no one could challenge the value of his contribution in getting Victorian buildings included within the listing system and helping persuade the National Trust to widen its net for them. During his Chairmanship, according to the then Minister for Planning, the Victorian Society had ‘saved a hundred years’.
Images
There are five images:
St George's Church, Aubrey Walk, London, by E. Bassett Keeling. (Photo: copyright Peter Jordan, licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence)
Bust of Disraeli, Russell Hotel, by C. Fitzroy Doll. (Photo: George P. Landow for VictorianWeb)
Ceiling of Lloyds Bank, Cambridge, by A. Waterhouse. (Photo: Jacqueline Banerjee for VictorianWeb)
Tiles for the Red House, Bexleyheath, by Philip Webb. (Photo: Jacqueline Banerjee for VictorianWeb)
Imperial Institute, South Kensington, by T.E. Collcutt. Postcard of 1904 from the collection of Dr. E. Chew, National University of Singapore
Slide 25 Topic 7 Pevsner’s pseudonyms
Pevsner wrote under various names besides his own during his long career:
• A novella in the style of Thomas Mann, written in his teens, appeared over the signature of ‘Nikolai Allo’.
• Writing of his experiences clearing bomb debris in Kentish Town in the aftermath of the Blitz, he used the pen-name ‘Ramaduri’, a Bavarian expression meaning ‘I confess’.
• As a regular contributor to the British wartime propaganda publication Die Zeitung, he wrote as ‘Peter Naumburg’. He chose the surname as a reminder of the German town which had been a refuge for him in his youth and its medieval cathedral with the sculptures that expressed for him all that was best in the German spirit.
• ‘Peter F.R. Donner’ was the alias which he used, while Assistant Editor of the Architectural Review, when he wanted to be controversial or to argue with himself in print. ‘Donner’ seems to have been chosen for no particular reason other than that it is the German for ‘thunder’.
• He may have chosen the self-mocking pseudonym ‘P. Dantry’ to cover his contribution to English History at a Glance, a ‘Culture Timetable’ from the Architectural Press, 1949
Images
There are two images:
A silhouette of an unidentifiable male
A masquerade mask in copper (Photo by permission of its sculptor, Jamie Santellano)
Slide 26 Topic 8 Pevsner and 20th-century architecture
When Pevsner first arrived in England, he had come from a background of change and insecurity. In Germany he had been on the threshold of a professorship; in England he was nobody. His faith in the Modern Movement was a constant and a consolation. But to portray him simply as a blinkered champion of modernism is too crude. His views on modern architecture evolved with the rest of his life in England, halting only when he faced developments that seemed to him beyond reason. Pevsner’s priority was that architecture should be humane – sympathetic to the needs, wants and aspirations of ordinary people and capable of creating the environment for a happy life.
(more)
Images
There are three images:
Chiswick Park tube station by Charles Holden, 1932. (Photo: copyright Chris Guy)
Royal Festival Hall, London, by LCC Architects’ Department, 1951 (Photo: open2.net/modernity)
Alton Estate, Roehampton, by LCC Architects’ Department, 1958-9. (Photo: open2.net/modernity)
Slide 27 Topic 8 Pevsner and 20th-century architecture (continued)
For this reason, just as he warmed to the modern Picturesque, his pet post-war hates were historicism, brutalism and expressionism. Historicism was the recycling of styles of the past which meant failing to capture and serve the spirit of the present age. Brutalism was a form of bullying, building by brute force, insensitive or indifferent to its surroundings. Expressionism involved the promotion of individual architectural personality in a building over the practical needs of its users.
‘I know I am a square man, who likes things square,’ wrote Pevsner . But ‘square’ for him meant not just the crisp outlines and frank expression of function of the 1930s modernists but, more importantly, an honesty and reasonableness that should be timeless. It was one of his greatest disappointments that the architects of the 1960s appeared to be declaring them – and him – out of date.
Images
There are eight images:
Senate and Chamber of Deputies, Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer, 1960. (Photo: Chris Diewald)
Sydney Opera House, Jorn Utzon, 1973. (Photo: John Dalkin)
Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, Le Corbusier, 1954.
St John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, Marcel Breuer, 1961. (Photo: maos)
Church of San Antonio de las Huertas, Mexico, Felix Candela, 1956. (Photo: Jim Saunders)
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Frederick Gibberd, 1967. (Photo: John Kennan)
Cambridge University History Library, James Stirling, 1968. (Photo: Steve Cadman)
University of East Anglia, Denys Lasdun, 1962-68. (Photo: Craig Butcher)
Slide 28 Topic 9 Pevsner’s allies and critics
This slide quotes three of Pevsner’s friends and three of his critics:
His friends:
Ernst Gombrich: ’ What he did in his lifetime was superhuman, in a way.’ (Photo of Gombrich by Yale University Press)
Geoffrey Grigson: ‘Much love to you, dear wise and learned man’ (Photo from www.poemhunter.com)
Alec Clifton-Taylor: ‘Nikolaus was a wonderful – and indeed in one respect an incomparable – friend and lover of England.’
His critics
John Harris: ‘Pevsner was very much the German bourgeois Jew – a certain amount of austerity and not a lot of giggles.’ (Photo of John Harris by Yale University Press)
Osbert Lancaster: ‘...The visual arts were not those at which the Teuton was ever likely to shine.’ (Photo of Osbert Lancaster from www.literarynorfolk.co.uk )
Professor David Watkin: ‘What Pevsner is effectively proposing is a morally, socially, politically and artistically cohesive package from which no one must be at liberty to abstain.’ (Photo of Professor Watkin by Michael Clifford)
Slide 29 External Links page
The slide contains links to seven external sites:
The PevsnerInfo blog, to be found at www.http://susieharries.wordpress.com/
The Buildings of England website
The book of essays Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner
Pevsner on Flickr
Pevsner on Twitter
Pevsner’s Reith Lectures radio broadcasts
The BBC 4 film Pevsner Revisited
Images
There are four images:
Pevsner the schoolboy
Pevsner in Italy, 1930
Pevsner, Lola and the dog Ello
Pevsner in old age, emerging from the lower deck of a yacht
Slide 30 Contact page
If you have any questions or would like to share information about Nikolaus Pevsner and his work, please visit my PevsnerInfo blog here, at www.http://susieharries.wordpress.com/
Images
There are five images:
Nika as a baby, in christening dress
Pevsner on skis, in the 1920s
The young academic
Pevsner the parent, cradling one of his children as a baby
Pevsner at large, circling a large church
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