Nikolaus Pevsner

Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig, in 1902, the young Nikolaus Pevsner lived through turbulent years in Germany. Despite early artistic ambitions, he began a promising career as a young academic in Dresden during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic, before his enforced move to England in 1933. Susie Harries explores the truth about his reported sympathies with elements of Nazi thought, his internment in England as an enemy alien, his mother's suicide in 1942 in a 'Jews' House' in Leipzig – and his return to occupied Germany – in a British uniform. On Pevsner's first visit to England, he had looked in vain for the kind of architectural guide he might have found in Germany. Years later, given the chance by Allen Lane at Penguin Books, he decided to write them himself, and so was born the defining moment of his career –The Buildings of England series – books that have made Pevsner's name synonymous with the exploration and enjoyment of English architecture. As a 'General Practitioner' of architectural history, Pevsner investigated an astonishing range of subjects in his writings, journalism and broadcasts, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee-houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. And as a renowned critic, academic and champion of Modernism, he became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction. His career is a prism through which to view the evolution of art history (and its publishing) in Britain – while his life as an outsider/insider at the heart of English art history illuminated both the predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so much to shape British culture after 1945. This fascinating biography is the story of the man as much as the work, exploring Pevsner's religious beliefs, political views and his long, complicated, but resilient marriage.