From the ground up: the pioneering life of architecture historian Pevsner

Nikolaus Pevsner The Life

AT 866 pages, this is not a book to be read at one sitting, yet it is difficult to put down. Its subject, Nikolaus Pevsner, is a complex and fascinating character; the biographer, Susie Harries, has a fine style, her writing crisp and well-paced and as fresh as if her task had not taken 20 years, and as if art and architectural scholarship was everyone’s cup of tea.

It’s not easy to find the lure within these many pages with which to attract an uninformed reader. Maybe the lure is that Pevsner was a kind of architect, a builder of cultural consciousness and a pioneer in the development of art history as a profoundly important area of public enrichment. He was, and is, an eye-opener in the sense of opening eyes to what lies around us. An irony not lost on his contemporary critics or on himself is that his most resonant work was done in conditions inflicted by his native land on his adopted country. As an exiled German, his vast exploratory field stretched over the ruins of Great Britain after the Second World War, although he had taken his first steps in British architectural study before that cataclysm.

Born in 1902 to a family of Russian Jews who lived in Germany for generations, Pevsner was baptised into the Lutheran church in 1921, having survived World War I as if without noticing it from his family home in Leipzig. Dominated by an artistic and unsatisfied mother, the large flat was cushioned against discomfort, but in his late teens the restless Nikolaus was in love, recording his feelings in the diary he maintained throughout his life, shattered by the suicide of his elder brother and adrift in the Germany of post-war austerity and confusion. He went to university in Munich to lay the foundations of a career in art history, a subject then popularly personified by Wilhelm Pinder. One of the pleasures of Harries’s book is the way she expands her context into the intricacies of different scholarly and critical and political developments. In the case of Pinder, focus of a loyalty that both characterised and weakened Pevsner, she is meticulous in tracing the fusion of a genuine respect for the values of German art with the growth of German nationalism and its later integration with the policies of the Third Reich.

Believing that “no artist can live against his century. The Zeitgeist must come out”, Pevsner remained for some time oblivious to, or untroubled by, the latent horrors of National Socialism as expressed by the Nazi party.

Harries does not absolve this scholarly immunity, which persisted even when all individual rights were suspended within a month of Hitler’s coming to power, even when the use of the Gothic script was restricted to ‘pure’ Germans, when Jewish lecturers, musicians and civil servants were dismissed and non-Aryan students were forbidden to attend German schools, universities and institutes. It was only when he himself was asked not to lecture that Pevsner, with his Jewish background, realised it was time for him to go abroad.

England was his eventual destination and it was in England, after difficulties including a period of internment as an enemy alien, that he grew into a professional arbiter, a writer with a profound expertise and marvellous, if controlled, instinct and intuition. This transformation and the people who, from assisting his first steps as a refugee to engaging him as a guide to the architecture of the country, were crucial to his future life and that of his family (a daughter had been left dangerously behind in Germany but was sheltered, at great risk, by relatives; his mother committed suicide while awaiting deportation to a concentration camp) are all considered by Harries.

These many people and organisations were also crucial to the inviolability of his reputation. His eventual status was, of course, gained by his unflagging work, his publications, his lecture tours, his teaching, his radio broadcasts, but Harries provides a professional and social background that, while sometimes almost too minute in its detail, fills to overcrowding the world to which Pevsner adapted until he became its pinnacle, or its beacon.

It wasn’t all National Trust stuff. Pevsner was alive to industrial design and commercial classicism and had no apparent sense of elitism in the arts. It was, after all, and after a few difficult early years, the time of what were called the Baedeker raids, when German air assaults were aimed at the loveliest towns in the country.

His controversial book Pioneers of the Modern Movement appeared in 1936 and was followed by An Outline of European Architecture in 1942 (written as buildings smashed to rubble all around him): both were important and recognised as such, but nothing has attained the influence and usefulness of The Buildings of England, a 46-volume production with Allen Lane, of Penguin, which was completed over 32 years while Pevsner also worked for the Architectural Review, for Birkbeck College, at Oxford, as Slade Professor at the University of Cambridge and as editor of The Pelican History of Art, not to mention his work for the BBC.

He could be mistaken, he was often controversial, his long marriage was anything but untroubled, his uninvited feud with John Betjeman was typical of the distaste he often encountered, that of the gifted native amateur for the foreign professional rival (but there is the consolation that the passionate convictions on the German-ness of German art in the 1920s would, by 1955, yield the BBC’s Reith lectures on The Englishness of English Art). It may have been through this antipathy that Pevsner was brought to his explicit statements on the relationship between architecture and religious feeling in the building of churches. For Betjeman the poet (and writer of guide-books), worship, especially in churches whose function was the true expression of the Book of Common Prayer, meant that church architecture was a case, above all, for substance over style. Pevsner, a man of low-church preferences, acknowledged the importance of aesthetics and liturgy, but argued for simplicity as expressed in the new Coventry Cathedral, a place for prayer as an ordinary part of ordinary life.

It’s all grist to Harries’ mill and, to complete the metaphor, she may grind slowly but she grinds exceeding small, quoting Pevsner’s reported comment on finding a religious service in progress on his inspection of a church: ‘Really, the uses some people put these places to…’ Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, CBE, died in England in 1983; thanks to an immense horde of letters, diaries, publications, recordings and interviews, Susie Harries brings him back to life and with him an entire cultural epoch.