Lecture at Heffers Bookshop, Cambridge

2nd December, 2002

by Stephen Games

Editor of Pevsner on Art and Design

(Published 28th November 2002 by Methuen)

That was the architectural critic and historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in 1966, in a radio talk that he gave called "The Anti-Pioneers" (included in the new book), baffled that what he called the style of the century – the style of the Bauhaus – had been eclipsed. According to all his expectations, this should not have happened. Pevsner, unlike academic historians today, had a view not only of what had happened in the past but what would happen in the future.

This is the Pevsner that I was brought up on. This is the Pevsner of Pioneers of Modern Architecture, which every art student and every architecture student was meant to read. Pioneers was a history book – it talked about the immediate pre-history of the aesthetic of Walter Gropius. But it was also a campaigning or proselytising book, because it gave us to understand that architecture was at the apex of all the arts – so that all ideas in aesthetics emanated from the architect: "All art, so long as it is sound and healthy, serves building". But more than that: it taught us that architects were going to be responsible for creating the conditions of a new civilisation which would have to do with truth and unity – qualities that the nineteenth century had lacked. These two factors – the superiority of architecture over the other arts and the supreme cultural role of the architect – made it a very desirable thing to be an architect in the 1940s and 50s and 60s and 70s. But it also imposed on architects the terrible burden of never being able to admit to being in the wrong because, according to Pevsner’s theory, they were bringing in the new millennium.

That’s one Pevsner: the Pevsner who spoke to architects and the present. But there’s another Pevsner: the Pevsner who spoke to art historians and the past. And it’s that Pevsner who is more associated with Cambridge. When Pevsner was 47, in 1949, he was invited to become the Slade Professor of Art at this university – and became the first person to be invited to stay on for a second three-year term. He mused on his time in Cambridge in 1952, in a radio talk, as he was about to start his second three-year term. He talked about how happy he was to have rooms in the building known as the Wedding Cake and to be able to walk for a mile without being offended by a single building, and to stand on a platform and not teach but simply talk about whatever fascinates him. And then he goes on to talk about how he wishes there was an art history course at Cambridge – and about the lack of art history teaching anywhere in Britain. (See p.155 – "That may not surprise you … more universities".)

You will see the connection between my two Pevsners: in the case of (a) the Pevsner who seems to be addressing architects, and (b) the Pevsner who’s addressing art history, there is a strong sense that there is something wrong with the status quo and that it needs to be fixed. In both cases, there is a silence about content. He doesn’t actually tell architects how they ought to build – quite rightly; he just assumes that by adopting the right set of values that belong to the twentieth century, they’ll automatically do what he regards as the right thing. And in the case of art history too, he doesn’t say how art history should be taught, simply that it should be taught. So there is a powerful sense of wanting to change conditions as he finds them, without prescribing the content of that change.

You wouldn’t know that if you looked at what is left of Pevsner’s reputation today. And I say "what is left" because just as Cambridge was a stepping stone on Pevsner’s rise to eminence in this country, so it was a stepping stone on his fall from grace. I’m talking of course about the dismantling of his reputation in 1977 by a young conservative art historian from Peterhouse by the name of Dr. David Watkin. Dr Watkin, as you know, brought out a study, published by Oxford, which analysed the writings of various architectural writers from Pugin to Pevsner and looked at their use of propaganda and how they cheated in the way they presented their case.

Dr Watkin’s book created outrage because he seemed so obviously a case of the pot calling the kettle black: that is to say, while apparently knocking propaganda, Watkin had an agenda of his own against the modern architecture that Pevsner represented and in favour of Neo-Classical architecture. That was naughty. And for that reason, many of us attacked Watkin at the time – I reviewed the book in the Sunday Times – and rallied to Pevsner’s support. But I have to acknowledge that Watkin’s book made its case and Pevsner’s high reputation began to be more widely questioned. He has in fact never recovered in art historical circles as a figure from whom one can learn objective facts, though he is now beginning to be studied as a historical phenomenon: this is how a very influential figure wrote about architecture in the middle of the 20th century. And architects, especially in the last quarter of the 20th century, no longer felt he had anything to say to them because they have regarded his fixation with the Bauhaus as a dead end; they wanted to be witty and clever and post-modern instead.

So where does he stand today? If Pevsner is no longer a figure of authority in contemporary architecture or the contemporary study of art history, he does at least command a position within the British establishment not just as a much-loved national figure but as an icon of Englishness, and it is within those quarters – and the press – that a certain mythology has grown up about him. That mythology is rooted in the major publishing project of Pevsner’s career, the epic 46-volume series The Buildings of England, the county guides to every building that mattered, which Penguin Books published between 1951-1974, and which Pevsner edited and wrote the bulk of (some 8.6 million words in all).

Now, as I’ve said, I came at Pevsner via his Pioneers of Modern Design, so I’m mainly interested in him as the writer of an inspirational work for architects. Art historians have mostly come at via his Outline of European Architecture, which came out in 1942. But the third route into him, through the Buildings of England, is a world unto itself, a national treasure, part of our literary crown jewels, enjoyed by a band of devotees not only as an encyclopedic resource but as a work of personal eccentricity. It is especially admired for the little phrases and epigrams that reveal not only Pevsner’s extraordinary ear for the richness of the English language but also a linguistic creativity born of an awareness – and an ability to supply – the need for a larger vocabulary than was then available to other architectural historians. For example:

• Of a church in Cornwall, he writes: "Top of the church tower. Decorated battlements and pinnacles each with four little sub-pinnacles, a most satisfying fullness of orchestration".

• Winchfield, Hampshire. "Much of the church is Norman of a singular ferocity!"
• Durham town hall: "For a Victorian town-hall, nicely humble" .
• And my favourite: "a building so intensely medieval as to be instantly recognisable as Victorian".

Of the making of Buildings of England, there exists also an inexhaustible fund of funny stories, about Pevsner when he was on his research trips told by the Courtauld students who used to drive him around, or by people he met or stayed with. I particularly like one about how when he was inspecting Lord Farringdon’s estate, he was flung by a goat surprised by the tempting sight of the Pevsnerian backside.

This kind of appreciation – anecdotal, and humorous and characterful – goes down very well with the English. Pevsner himself said of this country in his Reith Lectures that the English had a heightened taste for biography and narrative; it was in fact what Buildings of England was fighting against. But because of this, Pevsner’s popular reputation today resides in the hands of English anecdotalists and he himself has become the emblem of English self-absorption, this country’s love of itself. He has even been borrowed by the nationalist strain in British culture – which is odd because for much of his early career, English nationalists used to loathe him as an alien presence.

Not having come at Pevsner through the Buildings of England, I’m not really interested in the Anglophilia or the cultish reverence that surrounds him. But I am interested in the mythology that has grown up around these phenomena because I think it prevents us getting to him I think that the keepers of his flame have betrayed him by misrepresenting him and failing to appreciate who he truly was. Unlike them, what I have been particularly interested in finding out is who Pevsner was before he became England’s official expositor of all things English.

Pevsner was of course not English. He was born and brought up in Leipzig in Germany and only came to live in England in 1933 at the age of 31. Almost everything he then wrote was an attempt to provide England – England in particular – with resources which were already commonplace in Germany. Outline of European Architecture was virtually a summary of his student notes. His 50-volume Pelican History of Art was an attempt to copy the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, to which he contributed one volume when he was 26. And his Buildings of England series was based on the five-volume series Handbücher der Deutschen Kunstdenkmäler which appeared between 1905-12 written by Georg Dehio. All three projects were astonishing successes and entirely new for people in England and the English-speaking world. Of the three, however, we should put the PHA to one side because it does not contain his writing; and Outline, although it went into numerous ever-larger editions, is now no longer regarded as essential reading. That leaves Buildings of England as his principal lasting monument (though one with a very troubled history). Buildings of England was nothing less than a personal effort to document every building that mattered between Berwick-on-Tweed and The Lizard, a task that no one else had had the vision to accomplish since William the Conqueror and the Domesday Book. Colin MacInnes, whose novel about London teenagers Absolute Beginners came out in 1959, was so struck by the series as a work of social commentary and literary style that in 1960 he published an essay comparing Pevsner to Defoe and Dickens and embracing him as writer who not only elucidated Englishness but embodied it.

MacInnes felt that the fact that Pevsner was a foreigner challenged the conservative assumption that cultural insight must be racially innate. MacInnes, not a conservative, found this delightful. What Pevsner proved, MacInnes felt, was that "scholarship and method (and, one might add, very hard work) are all immensely valuable to anyone who also possesses … an understanding of our country born of patient enquiry and affection". This is now the common view of Pevsner and the view that The Buildings of England and its admirers have institutionalised: that Pevsner was a consummate professional as a historian, with a profound love of his adopted home. It is, however, a myth.

For one thing, Pevsner had no affection for England’s more recent efforts in the built arts and only a dim view of some of its earlier efforts. As a critic rather than a historian, his primary concern was not where architecture had been but where it was going to and he was scathing about new English architecture, which he found oscillated between the insipid if it was traditional-looking and the irrational if it meant to be up to date. And he wasn’t prepared to write passively about what he found. He wanted to move the country on from its dull reliance on neo-Georgian and convert us to the dramatic, white, functionalist architecture of the 1920s Bauhaus school. I think he probably envisaged the equivalent of towns like Bath and Cheltenham made up solely of Bauhaus terraces.

But another myth attaches to him. Because the Bauhaus was a design laboratory, it was always regarded as fundamentally left-wing – and Pevsner, as one of its principal propagandists, has always been thought of in the same way. So fixed is this view of him in Britain that in a BBC radio talk in 1964, he chose to stray from talking about Elizabethan architecture to insist that he was not now and never had been a Marxist. America, of course, has him even more pinned down. There, thanks to mischief-makers like the architect Philip Johnson, Pevsner’s reputation has been reduced to a leftist soundbite on the strength of his Pioneers of Modern Design. As recently as April of this year, a reviewer in the New York magazine The New Criterion wrote, as if it went without saying, that "like the socialist Nikolaus Pevsner, today’s critics and historians adopt a Hegelian/Marxian view of social progress". But this too is wrong.

At first glance, the idea of Pevsner as a historical anglophile is plausible. For most of his life, he wrote about English architecture, and with a verve and authority that few others could match. As a child, he was inducted into English culture by his mother, who subscribed to English art magazines like The Studio and translated a volume on English utilitarianism by the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau. But he came of age in a Germany that saw Britain as its enemy and the Great War as a justified assault by the Kaiser on British economic might. The heroes who most impressed him in his youth, including Thomas Mann and Oswald Spengler (to whom he once sent a gift), shared the view that England was the cause of their ills, that defeat in the war was undeserved and that there was unfinished business to be settled. There is no evidence to suggest that Pevsner felt any differently.

He was also not thrilled by his first view of England – not in 1930, as he always claimed, but as a young boy on a pre-First World War visit with his mother to see her parents, who had settled in the grim London suburb of West Hampstead. This left him with the impression of a mean, miserable city, a view subsequently reinforced. As for the country as a whole, he found it shabby and inefficient and its sense of design lamentable. He sympathised with the opinion of Spengler and the majority of his countrymen that Britain was a dying culture in which "conservatism comes dangerously near inertia" – a view excised by the BBC when he tried to express it in more detail in his BBC Reith lectures in 1955.

What launched Pevsner on his mission to make sense of English architecture in Building of England was not originally a warmth for the country itself (though this came later) but

1. the sheer challenge of the fact that no one else had done it; and
2. an intellectual appreciation of what British designers in the nineteenth-century had meant for Germany designers in the twentieth. What Pevsner believed is very important: that the English Arts and Crafts movement had dropped the baton some time around 1900 and that Germany had picked it up. It was this subject – the creative ascendancy of Germany over England and the supremacy of Walter Gropius – that became the subtext of Pioneers in 1936.

Pioneers was Pevsner’s first English-language book and stressed the universality of the modern German architectural style – the Bauhaus style – but he had conceived and prepared the book in Germany and delivered it originally, in lecture form, to a German student audience. This is why when Gropius appears at the end of the book, the measured speech of the earlier chapters suddenly becomes triumphalist. This strange shrillness of tone made no sense to Pevsner’s English readership and even had to be toned down after the war, but it was highly significant in Germany. Pevsner was showing that while Germany may have been defeated by the Allies in the Great War, this was more than compensated for by its victory over them in the battle for Western civilisation. Spengler had warned of the collapse of that civilisation into chaos; Pevsner saw Gropius as the man who would raise Western culture out of its mire and himself as Gropius’s John the Baptist, heralding his coming.

This is very different from the man supposed to have enjoyed a love affair with an England that glories in being parochial and self-absorbed. It was precisely that insularity that he hated. Even when addressing the past rather than the present, what Pevsner cared about was not English architecture per se but English architecture as a sub-species of Continental architecture. Like Freud, his writing measured the level of deviation between specific cases and the norm; and the norm, for Pevsner, was Europe. In the 1940s, for example, no one in the country took the German Baroque seriously, which is why Pevsner in Outline had ot say that anyone who felt repelled by it but could admire a Gothic Devon screen was either not looking properly or wearing "the blinkers of puritanism". His message was that we needed to European norms in order to appreciate England. (His most ardent BoE fans quickly dispensed with the first part of this message.)

The myth of Pevsner as an honorary Englishman is bound up with the myth about his politics. Pevsner was a brilliant art history student at Leipzig University in the early 1920s but what particularly attracted him to the subject was the personality of his teacher, Wilhelm Pinder. Pinder had also studied at Leipzig, around 1900; had gone on to write about German medieval sculpture and architecture, and was then wounded on active service. He became chair of art history at Leipzig in 1920 and he was taken on by the Philosophy Faculty because he was a maverick and iconoclast who would attract students. Pinder was impatient with conventional art history and keen – as any lecturer would be – on firing his students’ passions. He did this by associating art history with what they and he felt most passionate about: the rebirth of Germany. Under Pinder, art history took on the supreme function of determining German national character, revealing its historic strengths, dismantling the reputations of France and Italy, and predicting the rise of the German Volk. The idea was that through art history, Germany could better understand its true nature, draw on that understanding of itself and elevate itself from its current decline. Pevsner found this captivating and it led him into forms of scholarly behaviour that now astound us – notably the habit of cultural generalisation. (It was the idea that underlies his Reith lectures.) Spain, he wrote in Outline, was a more ‘restless’ country than Italy whereas French and English architecture in the thirteenth century had an ultimate identity of spirit. He also predicted what sort of art a country would produce and to rescue artistic reputations. He praised German architecture, for example, for the ‘authenticity’ of its national spirit and contrasted it with the ‘virtuosity’ of the Italians which he regarded as inauthentic, an interpretation that grew out of Germany’s defensive response to what had for centuries been regarded as the superiority of its neighbours’ art.

Pinder’s scholarship blurred the divide between culture and politics. Some of his most ardent writing was about the insult done to Germany by France at the end of the First World War. His greatest compliment to fellow academics was to congratulate them on their Germanness. As political life in Germany became more desperate, Pinder’s faith in nationalist solutions grew. In November 1933, six months after Hitler came to power and started purging the universities, Pinder joined the philosopher Heidegger and other Leipzig academics to call on world opinion to be more appreciative of Hitler’s policies. Later, during the Second World War, he advised the Nazis on the identification and disposal of looted art. Pevsner dedicated his book on Academies of Art, Past and Present to Pinder in 1940, an extraordinary gesture for a German to make at a time of war – for Pevsner was a German national until 1946. But there was a special affection between them, intellectual and personal. Pevsner had fights with other academics in Germany but never with Pinder, and he acknowledged his debt in his 1969 bibliography.

Because Pevsner was a modernist and had arrived in England in late 1933 as a refugee from Nazism, he has always been taken to be an enemy of Nazi thought. In fact, the opposite was the case: what drew him to Pinder drew him to Hitler too. We know this from the writings of Francesca Wilson, a Birmingham schoolteacher who came across him by chance in May 1933. Wilson was visiting her brother-in-law who taught in the English department at Göttingen University; through him, she met Pevsner who had also been teaching. Just as she arrived, new Nazi legislation banned Jews from state employment and this put Pevsner out of a job, because he was the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. What astounded her about him was that instead of attacking the Nazi regime for destroying his promising academic career, Pevsner praised it. In an article in the Birmingham Post later in the month, she quoted him as saying:

Her account was not mistaken. Within a year of his dismissal from Göttingen, Pevsner had written a couple of articles for the press, broadly supporting Goebbels’s insistence on the right of the state to dictate everything that happened within it, including artistic production. His only caveat was that if the Reich could be a little more broadminded, it could recruit artists who until then had shunned Nazi ideology. He continued to write for Germany from England until 1937.

The intensity of Pevsner’s identification with Germany cannot be explained as simply the product of indoctrination at university or the political instability of the Weimar years. It went back to his youth, to his feelings about his family and to the condition of being Jewish in a Germany where even before Hitler, anti-Semitism was officially promoted. As an individual, Pevsner regarded himself as immune from prejudice. (Wilson recorded that he was "tall and blonde – only a German with a sixth sense would have known that he wasn’t Aryan".) What might hobble him, he feared, was his background. His parents with their Russian-Yiddish accents were immediately identifiable as part of the wave of immigration from the east and Pevsner was painfully sensitive to the shadow that they might cast over him. He also found Judaism repulsive, refused to go through with his religious initiation at the age of 13, converted to Evangelical Lutheranism at the age of 19 and put on record at Leipzig University that he had been born a Christian. Two years later, he married the daughter of one of the foremost appeal judges in Germany, from a family that joked that it could trace its antecedents back to Charlemagne.

The consequence of this is that the Pevsner who came to England in 1933 because the Nazis would not let him teach in Germany was forced to go into multiple denial: about his loyalty to Germany, about his belief in Hitler, about his origins as a Jew and about his unwillingness to be in England. So automatic did this suppression of himself become that in spite of his obligations as a historian, he was happy to misrepresent himself and be misrepresented by others. In a radio talk in 1954, he told listeners: "my origins are in a part of Germany which is Protestant and in this country I would certainly be called very low church indeed". He was horrified at the thought of personal exposure. In 1960, when Francesca Wilson asked him for some personal details to flesh out a 600-word article she was writing about refugees, he greeted her with a scream of terror. She replied that the feature was for a government publication that would go out only to "the legations of all those upstart little new nations in Africa" but he would not move.

About two years ago, the producer of a programme that Jonathan Meades was making for the BBC asked me whether there was a magic thread that unravelled Pevsner’s secrets. I told him I thought there was but said nothing else. The programme subsequently went out without any hint of the tensions on which Pevsner’s career in Britain was founded. In fact, no one has ever successfully related Pevsner’s writing to his political affiliations in Germany and his troubled identity. The closest that anyone has come is, as suggested earlier, his former pupil David Watkin. Watkin observed that some of Pevsner’s more extreme rhetoric from the mid-1930s was reminiscent of the Nazis but then suggested that Pevsner was following a neo-Marxist programme. He specifically added that Pevsner would not have wished to identify himself with either Bolshevism or National Socialism. We now know that that was wrong.

The question is, how must we now re-evaluate him? Over the next few years, we can expect a stream of academic material casting Pevsner in a new light. Researchers from left and right will scour his writings for evidence of undemocratic tendencies; hitherto innocent passages will be read for sinister intentions. That would be a pity and it is one of the reasons why I have sat on this material for almost twenty years. In fact, the only reason why I have finally lifted the lid is that a German academic at Birkbeck’s conference in the summer mentioned Pevsner’s pro-Nazi writings in the German press in 1933 and 1934, which set delegates’ tongues wagging. Since I was about to produce a book about Pevsner anyway for this centenary year, it was clear that something would at last need to be said.

What difference does it make? Far from being an anglophile, Pevsner resisted the prospect of coming to live in England until in 1935 it became his only realistic option; he also probably tried to offer his services to the Reich as a German in exile, as Gropius and others did after leaving Germany. Even after settling here, his instincts remained resolutely campaigning. Nationalist thinking – Germany’s belief in national rebirth – had refocussed his efforts from redefining the art of the past to propagandising for an art of the present. This interest continued when he arrived in Britain, where his first efforts were directed at getting the British to confront their own bad taste. The difficulty he ran into was that his most convincing role models were all German; there was almost nothing that he could point to in this country that he felt deserved imitation. This turned his mission into a contest not between old and new but between Britain and Germany, and with the coming of war, that was not something that the country would take kindly to. Although town planners found his later writings a convenient pretext for inevitable acts of destruction, Pevsner actually had no impact whatsoever on the subsequent development of British architecture. Having delivered his verdict on the inescapable rightness of Gropius, he wrote little else that took contemporary design forward and was forced merely to repeat and repeat his earlier convictions.

Had he been able to remain in Germany, where both the left and the right could enjoy the Modern Movement, Pevsner would undoubtedly have played a commanding role in architecture’s further evolution, had Hitler not banned modernism in 1937. In Britain, there was nothing he could do except to be generally critical and negative about what he saw. The result of that was personal frustration. In addition, his instincts as a reformer were almost wholly swamped. When he was able to express himself on the subject of contemporary design, as he did in a third of the 80 or so radio talks that he gave for the BBC (mostly not included in the collection just published), his tone tended to become unattractive and hectoring tone. Fortunately for his listeners, the BBC weaned him out of this; but the result is that his most successful talks make him appear to be a man of the past. And that, in fact, is how this country now receives him: learned, eccentric and above all, safe. My argument, and it is the argument of the book, is that the real Pevsner, the suppressed Pevsner, was a German and that he stands for something quite unlike from what is normally assumed about him.

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