Nikolaus Pevsner was born in 1902 in Leipzig, Germany, where he completed his doctoral thesis on Baroque architecture in 1924. Following the introduction of the Nazi race laws in 1933, he immigrated to London, where he lectured at Birkbeck College, London University, and was then appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge University. He wrote celeberated volumes on architecture for Penguin Books and, despite his increasingly modernist outlook, was also a founding member and chairman of the Victorian Society.
Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner was born in 1902 in Leipzig, Germany, to Hillel Pewsner, later Hugo Pevsner (1869–1940) and Anna Perlmann (d. 1942). His father was a fur trader of Russian-Jewish descent. Pevsner, however, renounced his Jewish roots and converted to Evangelical Lutheranism at the age of 19. Pevsner studied in various cities in Germany, including Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt. In 1923 he married Karola (Lola) Kurlbaum, also a Lutheran, whose mother was of Jewish descent. Pevsner completed his doctoral thesis on the Baroque architecture of merchant houses in his native city in 1924. In 1925, Pevsner experienced Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau and Le Corbusier's Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, two events that changed his career.
Pevsner arrived in England in 1933, fleeing Germany as a result of the anti-Jewish employment laws introduced by the Nazis, which led to the loss of his teaching post at the University of Göttingen. He had already travelled around Britain in the early 1930s and had a strong affinity with British art and architecture. Discussing William Morris in the late 1920s, Gropius told Pevsner 'I owe him so very much' – a remark which further enhanced Pevsner's interest in English architecture. Pevsner's first research post in Britain was with the University of Birmingham, which focused on the role of the designer in the industrial process. He was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for Gordon Russell, a pioneering firm of furnishers and designers. This work further influenced Pevsner's thinking about art and industry and the rise of the modern movement. His seminal Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius was published in 1936. In 1940, Pevsner was briefly interned as an enemy alien at Huyton Camp, outside Liverpool, where he spent three months. From 1936 onwards, he had actively contributed to the Architectural Review, stepping in as an acting editor in 1942–45. Around the same time, he began a long association with Penguin Books, for whom he wrote An Outline of European Architecture (1942). Pevsner also lectured at Birkbeck College, University of London (1942–67), and was appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge University (1949–55). From 1945 onwards he worked on the monumental 46-volume series of county-by-country guides, Buildings of England, and also edited the Pelican History of Art series. He gained British citizenship in 1946.
After the war, Pevsner became involved in broadcasting and gave talks on BBC radio on diverse topics in the arts, including delivering the annual Reith Lectures in 1955: a series of six broadcasts entitled The Englishness of English Art, in which he explored the qualities of art which he regarded as particularly English. In 1957 Pevsner was a founding member of the Victorian Society, the national charity for the study and protection of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts. In 1964 he was invited to become its chairman and steered the society through its formative years, fighting alongside John Betjeman, Hugh Casson and others to save houses, churches, railway stations and other monuments of the Victorian age from destruction. For ten years (1960–70) he served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (The Coldstream Committee), campaigning for art history to be a compulsory element in the curriculum of art schools. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1965 and awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1967. Pevsner was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1953 and was knighted in 1969 for services to art and architecture. He also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh in 1975. Pevsner's last years, marred by Parkinson's disease, were spent at 2 Wildwood Terrace, Hampstead, London, which had long been his home. He died there on 18 August 1983 and was buried in the churchyard of Clyffe Pypard, the village near the Pevsners' family cottage in Wiltshire.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Nikolaus Pevsner]
Publications related to [Nikolaus Pevsner] in the Ben Uri Library