Moses of the modern movement.

REASSESSING NIKOLAUS PEVSNER 

Edited by Peter Draper. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2004. [pounds sterling]55

The 50th anniversary of the Buildings of England series, better known as 'Pevsners', began a round of conferences and publications which by now can be designated Pevsnerology. This volume of essays is the outcome of the Pevsner centenary conference held at Birkbeck College in July 2002.

Contributors deal with his intellectual and cultural background, his style and approach as well as his handling of the two issues with which he grappled most tenaciously-Englishness and Modernism. There are anomalies at every turn--hence the 'reassessment' in the title and the reference in Paul Crossley's introduction to the polarities which remained central to his thinking.

Ute Engel, discussing Pevsner's background in German art history in the early 1930s, traces the roots of his admiration for the higher collective aim ('eliminating the shoddy' as he put it) back to the utopian socialist pantheon in which William Morris and the Bauhaus were enthroned, to be celebrated in his Pioneers of Modern Design the arguments of which were already in embryonic form as early as 1931.

Among the most interesting contributions, at least for the non-academic reader, is Adrian Forty's essay on Pevsner's language in the Buildings of England. He shows how that crisp unburdened language was carefully and consciously shorn of any attempt to call up associations or the preferences of taste. Grounded in the objectivity of Wolfflin, he succeeded in conveying the visible evidence with what Reyner Banham called his 'snap-crackle-pop' prose. The result, Forty argues, was a resoundingly democratic view of the qualitatively superior built environment--a genuine sense of architecture for all.

The enterprise points to the eventual Englishness of Pevsner--an osmotic process which saw him steering the wartime Architectural Review in some surprising directions, interestingly discussed by Michela Rosso. Peter F. R. Donner (aka Nikolaus Pevsner) offered his readers a series of 'treasure hunts', pursuing the vernacular architecture of the nineteenth century while his alter ego explored the picturesque applications of English modernism. No wonder Banham (a later AR editor) and Pevsner were to fall out, as the latter's aversion to Expressionism saw pupil and master part ways.

This satisfying volume weaves together many strands, offering its fair share of paradox, and yet convincingly celebrates Pevsner's stated belief in 'the blessings of modesty, faith in service, and a certain neutrality'.