Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life

About this book

Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902 Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Gttingen. When in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here over a long and amazingly industrious career he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually referred to simply as Pevsner. As a critic academic and champion of Modernism Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a general practitioner of architectural history he covered an astonishing range from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsners reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology his internment in England as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen -- secret diaries he kept from the age of 14 for another sixty years -- reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife Lola every day that they were apart). Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsners private papers and through them to have seen into the workings of his mind. Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself. He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the rigour of German scholarship he became an Everyman in his copious commissions publications broadcasts and lectures on art architecture design education town planning social housing conservation Mannerism the Bauhaus the Victorians Zeitgeist Englishness and how a nations character may or must be reflected in its art. His life -- as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history -- illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental migrs who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.