Back Issue Rising Ambitions, Expanding Terrain Number 21, Fall 2004/Winter 2005

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Book Reviews

Reviewed by Christopher Long

Pevsner on Art and Architecture

The Radio Talks

by Nikolaus Pevsner
Edited and and with introduction by Stephen Games

London: Methuen, 2002

When Nikolaus Pevsner arrived in England in late 1933 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, he was virtually unknown. Although he had lectured for several years at Göttingen University and published an authoritative book on Italian Mannerist and Baroque painting (Die italienische Malerei vom Ende der Renaissance bis zum augehenden Rokoko [1927]), Pevsner did not share the lofty reputation of his more noted fellow exile scholars from Central Europe—Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Rudolf Wittkower, and Ernst Gombrich. Three decades later, Pevsner had become, along with Gombrich and Kenneth Clark, perhaps the most recognized authority on the history of art in Britain. He was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge to be reappointed for a second term and the first reappointed to the Slade Professorship at Oxford. He was the author of the most widely read English-language book on Modern architecture, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936; republished in 1949 as Pioneers of Modern Design), and of the forty-six-volume Penguin guide, the Buildings of England, known to most simply as “Pevsner.” He had also become, in large part due to his radio talks for the BBC over three decades, from the end of World War II to the late 1970s, one of the most visible “public intellectuals” of the postwar years.

Pevsner's spectacular ascent to the Olympian heights of the British academic world was the result of an almost frantic work regimen. In addition to the Buildings of England (which would have more than filled the careers of most ordinary mortals), he authored several textbooks and numerous scholarly works, and was a regular contributor to, and, for a time, editor of, the Architectural Review. He was also founding editor of The Pelican History of Art and The Buildings of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and he took on various consulting jobs, one of which resulted in the publication, in 1937, of An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, a landmark examination of the state of modern design in the country.

But it was less Pevsner's prodigious output than his ability to communicate his ideas clearly and forcefully that was responsible for his success. Throughout his life, he sought to heighten and extend the public's understanding of art and architecture by making them seem ordinary—or, at least, graspable—for those willing to make a small effort. In Pevsner's writings, the heady problems of art become vignettes about which one could make judgments and take positions. His prose is always a splendid amalgam of careful erudition, remarkable insight, scholarly conjecture, and unfettered opinion. To read Pevsner is to enter immediately into a dialogue, at times comfortable and affirming, at others, annoying and off-putting.

Anyone who has spent time with Pioneers of Modern Design knows what a brilliant and vexing work it is. It was based on a series of lectures Pevsner presented at Göttingen shortly before he departed for England. Pevsner is often incorrectly credited, as Stephen Games writes in his perceptive introduction to Pevsner on Art and Architecture, with first “assembling the chain of events that led from English utilitarianism to German functionalism” (xxii). But while Pioneers is not an entirely original book—many of its arguments are anticipated in Hermann Muthesius's Stilarchitektur und Baukunst, published in 1902, and in other pre-World War I writings)—it does offer, on first reading at least, a lucid account of Modern architecture's early origins. Yet the book raises far more questions than it answers. How do French and Belgian Art Nouveau lead to German functionalism? How do two currents so seemingly in opposition—the new engineering of the 19th century, with its faith in science and the machine, and the Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to deny industrialization and rampant Capitalism—both fuel the rise of Modern design? Pevsner's answer, that all were the expression of a new Zeitgeist, is reassuring to some degree, but it also insistently begs the question.

"His prose is always a splendid amalgam of careful erudition, remarkable insight, scholarly conjecture, and unfettered opinion. To read Pevsner is to enter immediately into a dialogue, at times comfortable and affirming, at others, annoying and off-putting."

Pevsner's recourse to the “spirit of the age” runs through many of his writings. It allowed him, as Games notes, “to connect national differentiation in mid-thirteenth-century architecture with the experience of Crusader knights, and to write of the late eighteenth century as a period when artists 'were no longer satisfied with being servants of the ruling class' and a new type of patron emerged, 'self-made, self-assured and cultured'” (xix). Such “loose” scholarship by today's standards was very much part of the German academic world of Pevsner's earliest years, and it became a highly elastic tool for those engaged in the Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities, or, literally, the “sciences of the spirit”) to fashion broad and sweeping visions of the past, present, and future. On the one hand, it could offer, in the hands of a historian like Jakob Burckhardt, an extraordinary panorama of an entire era like the Renaissance. But too often it led to the sort of cursory reading one finds in works like Egon Friedell's Die Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (The Cultural History of Mankind, 3 vols., 1927-1932) or, worse, to the rabid nationalist drivel of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Even Pevnser, who was born into an assimilated Jewish family and converted to Evangelical Lutherism when he was in his late teens, was not immune to the lure of German nationalism. Like many German intellectuals of the early 1930s, he was powerfully drawn to the Nazis' promise of political and spiritual redemption. He told one refugee worker he met in Birmingham in 1933, “There is much that is Puritan and moral in the [Nazi] movement—a great drive is to be made against luxury, vice and corruption. . . . For fifteen years we have been humiliated by outside Powers. No wonder that Hitler appeals to our youth when he tells them to believe in themselves again, that the future is theirs to mould, that if they are united Germany will no longer be the pariah of the world” (xxiv). That it was a Nazi edict that suspended his teaching privileges and forced him into exile should have forced Pevsner to reevaluate his views, but as late as 1934 he was writing articles in the German press defending Josef Goebbels and the principle of the state's right to determine cultural policy.

Pevsner did part company with the Nazis on the question of Modernism. Though he shared with Hitler and most of the Nazi leadership a disdain for abstract art, he remained an enthusiastic supporter of Gropius and the Bauhaus. Nonetheless, an essential element of Pevsner's belief in the importance of Modern architecture was that it was neither “personal” nor “subjective.” The new century, he wrote in the first edition of Pioneers of the Modern Movement, “leaves less space for self-expression than did any period before” (quoted in Games's introduction, xxiii). Modernism was a product of an “overpowering collective energy,” and, because it was “a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion,” it was also “totalitarian.” (When the book was republished after the war, some of the shriller language was altered and Pevsner's call for a new totalitarian art was concealed behind a less threatening trend toward “universalism.”)

Pevsner was careful, however, not to talk about politics in public, and in the years after World War II he made the successful transition from an immigrant with a suspect past to a beloved national figure. He accomplished this feat of self-transformation in part through his radio talks for the BBC beginning in early 1945. At first, as Games notes, Pevsner's broadcasts were not a success. The problem rested not with his faint German accent, but, rather, with the fact that he sounded too strident, wooden, and unintentionally condescending. Over time, he found a friendlier and lighter tone, and when the BBC launched its “Third Programme,” which was devoted to more highbrow fare, Pevsner became a fixture of the broadcasts.

"The wonderful sense of intimacy and familiarity one finds in his prose is a reflection of his delight in learning, in thinking, and in discussing. In a time when reading much of our scholarship is more chore than pleasure, maybe we, too, should follow Pevsner's lead."

The forty-five written texts Games has collected in this book represent about half of Pevsner's radio talks. Games standardized the spelling, usage, and punctuation but otherwise has reproduced the essays as originally written. About a third of the texts focus on art, the remainder on architecture. Though they span most of the history of art since the Middle Ages, the majority center on the 19th and 20th centuries. There are lectures on Victorian architecture, John Ruskin, William Morris, Antoni Gaudí, the Viennese Secessionists, the problem of revivalism, and the state of architecture in the 1960s. All bear the hallmarks of Pevnser's prose style: at once informed, cultured, interesting, and sometimes elegant.

But why read Pevsner today? After all, many of his positions are dated now, and some of Pevsner's scholarship has been superseded by more recent research. One reason certainly is that these essays offer remarkable insight into the architectural discourse of the last century. In his 1961 talk, “The Return of Historicism,” for example, he describes—with some alarm—the reappearance of a new “emotionalism” in the works of Le Corbusier, Jörn Utzon, Eero Saarinen, and others. Tellingly, Pevsner ascribes this wave of “neo-Expressionism” to the failure of Modernism itself: “The style,” he writes, “was too exacting, too perfectionist, too puritanical and perhaps too inflexible to be a popular success. It was never wholly accepted, certainly not in England or France, in the United States or Italy; and in Germany, where more than anywhere it was accepted, Hitler suppressed it” (273). This is a striking admission for one of Modernism's most ardent supporters—and it speaks volumes about the collapse in faith in the new architecture that began in the late 1950s. Pevsner sounds the same themes again in a later essay, “The Anti-Pioneers,” broadcast in 1966, in which he decries the appearance of an anti-rationalist architecture, and what he writes at the end is both characteristic and wonderfully perceptive:

What is happening in architecture today is in the line of descent of the High Victorian Style, of Art Nouveau and of Expressionism, not the International Modern of Gropius and Mies. It is ill suited for most architecture now because the majority of buildings are built of industrially produced—that is, impersonal—materials, because the majority of buildings are built for large numbers of anonymous clients and because the first concern of the architect must therefore be with their practical and emotional needs and not with the expression of his own personality. And finally, the style of today is unlikely to last, just as Art Nouveau and Expressionism didn't last, because phases of so excessively high a pitch of stimulation can't last. We can't, in the long run, live our day-to-day lives in the midst of explosions. (307)