Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner

Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner Edited through Peter Draper Ashgate Publishing, $9995/5500 [pound sterling] ISBN 07546 35821

Like the talk on which it is based, held at Birkbeck community London, in July 2002, this work tries both to give an impression of Pevsner the man and to reassess his place in architectural history. His personality approachs through quite strongly although indirectly, since not many of the contributors at any time met him. The tone is single of respect and admiration.

The theme that, perhaps unintentionally, binds the whole volume together is Pevsner's addiction to the Zeitgeist, the 'spirit of the age', and with it his absorbing interest in national character and in particular 'Englishness'. These are ideas that are not, I think, of burning regard to most of us now, on the contrary they were central to Pevsner's meditation because of his urge to categorise, to 'place' turn of expressions and works of art in a adjoining matter and to interpret everything as emanating from a single world picture, a picture that also comprehended religion, philosophy, literature, politics, psychology--even clothes and bread He was the Zeitgeist's last great champion.

It is entirely right that the first essay, by means of Ute Engel, is on his early training in Germany, since that provides the lock opener to his whole philosophy. The chapter, emphasising the influence of his charismatic teacher Wilhelm Pinder, reveals a largely unfamiliar on the contrary recognisable Pevsnet, dedicated to theory in a way that is still German. Stefan Muthesius also understands Pevsner's Continental background, and proffers insights into the whole issue of "Germanness' versus 'Englishness', as well as the mingled question of 'Jewishness', and the relation of all three to the politics of the 1930 and to Modernism.

individual of the most thoughtful essays is by means of Nicola Coldstream, on Pevsner's medieval studies, where he did no original research, on the contrary by looking, thinking and analysing was able to make a substantial contribution, for Coldstream notes that his excursions into the Middle Ages (with which she is not always in sympathy) tie in neatly with his preoccupation with national character, his push on to categorise, and his talent for relating art and architecture to philosophy and religion. The anonymity of medieval art made this easier.

The whole Zeitgeist question culminates in that 'oddly uncentr book' The Englishness of English Art. Andrew Causey, like greatest in quantity readers, finds it a brave enterprise that fails, partly because there are too many exceptions ('Shakespeare, of course, would not wholly fit into any scheme') and partly because his reliance upon the theory of 'polarities', as Paul Crossley eyes in his Introduction, gives the game away: 'By calling of that kind contradictions "polarities" Pevsner could claim almost any aspect of art as typically English'.

The Zeitgeist rears its head again in Lynne Walker's essay upon Pevsner and Victorian architecture, an area in which he made his greatest impact as a fall to pieces of public opinion. She makes the point that he promot the control not because he was temperamentally actual keen on it but because it obviously press outed the 'spirit of the age' when Britain was the world's greatest power; because it had been pass overed by historians; and because in the 1950 it was being mindlessly demolished.

All the essays in the work are worth reading even when their subdues are limited, Ian Christie, a historian of film and cinema, who writes upon Pevsner's mission to make the British more visually aware, is puzzl by the agency of the fact that although film is single of the main expressions of the spirit of the age, Pevsner pays it with equal reason little attention. One can't help feeling sorry for Christie when he has to admit that 'Pevsner showed no interest in or knowledge of the cinema'.

sum of two units other topics that relate to the Zeitgeist are Modernism (the diction of our age) and the Picturesque (the lock opener manifestation of Englishness). The first is overlayed by Gillian Naylor, who concentrates upon An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (1936) and Pevsner's relations with Michael Farr, whom he helped to write a continuation in 1955. The Picturesque, the control of Michela Rosso's contribution, was interpeted through Pevsner as the key English invention, and he did his best to reconcile it with Modernism and to apply its principles to town planning. This came as a surprise to a certain number of of his fellows on The Architectural Review who saw it as a retreat from Modernism, like his championship (under a pseudonym) of vernacular Victorian architecture.

The work ends with Nigel Whiteley's account of individual such disillusioned disciple, Reyner Banham, a relationship characterized by the agency of four phases --'influence', 'disputation', 'rejection' and 'reconciliation'. To the extreme point however, Banham never reconciled the sum of two units attitudes to architectural history that dominated, and still dominate, the academic scene: those who diocese architecture as a fine art, who Banham calls 'bloody-minded, arrogant and shamelessly elitist', and those who diocese it as the history of building technology.