Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life

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Random House, Aug 18, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 928 pages

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 Göttingen. 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 Pevsner's 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 Pevsner's 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 nation's 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 émigrés who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.

 

Contents

Leipzig youth 19021921
1
This is how I am
3
A talent for misery
20
Castles in the air
34
Entwicklungsroman
42
Academic on the rise 19211933
49
It takes diligence to make a genius
51
Coupled to a tender heart
62
Birkbeck and the excursions
417
a milder modernism
435
Cambridge 19491954
448
The grim mopping up of work
462
The Englishness of English Art
484
No time to laugh
501
Pevsner and Betjeman
527
Always doing
550

Germanys present ruin
68
Now the climb can begin
79
The satisfaction of getting there
90
England 1930
97
Culturepolitics
107
Antechambering
120
Changing tracks England 19331939
131
If a German why this one?
133
More than just an episode
152
Amor fati
174
Little man what now?
188
Pioneers of the Modern Movement
201
95 British is as far as we can go
226
Pevsners war 19391946
245
Phoney War
247
Internee 54829
258
1941
283
Now we are scattered
312
Contrast surprise and irregularity
335
Pevsner in an English uniform
359
Digging in 19461959
379
the beginnings of the Buildings of England
381
Theyve come to read the meter Ma
399
uncovering the Victorians
567
Establishment figure 1960s
581
On Finding Oneself Out of Date
583
NonStopography
594
Was it before or after 1963?
610
life without Lola
633
Looking at old buildings with an old man
655
More than is good for a mans work
670
This intercalation of labours
679
The only one is duty
697
Endings 1970s
711
Quite enough of that now
713
Give me time eternal gods
729
Is it in Pevsner?
742
Right good is rest
757
Morality and architecture
764
Conclusion
765
Not quite in the English way
795
Note on Sources and Abbreviations
803
Notes
805
Copyright Acknowledgements
831
Index
835
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

Susie Harries is a writer specializing in culture, history and the arts. Born in 1951 in London, where she now lives with her husband Meirion and their two sons, she read classics and classical philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and St Anne's College, Oxford.She has co-authored seven books with her husband, including major works on twentieth-century arts:The Academy of St Martin in the Fields (1981), The War Artists (1983) and A Pilgrim Soul: a Life of Elisabeth Lutyens (1989).She has also written for the Independent and reviewed books on the arts for The Times Literary Supplement.

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