[audiobook] Pevsner - The Early Life: Germany and Art by Stephen Games at Arts-Photography

Review

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Pevsner Volume 1: the author repliesBy Stephen GamesI am the author of the book on this page. and Im happy to take this opportunity to respond to issues submitted by readers.First. this book was written largely as a textbook for undergraduate students in a variety of fields - in particular. general and cultural history. art and architecture history. and German studies. Its main task is to understand Nikolaus Pevsner not as he came to be known in Britain from the 1940s. as a magically born-again Englishman. nor as he came to known in the USA from the 1960s. as the mean-spirited father-figure who wished to suppress the younger architectural generations natural exuberance. Both these views are anachronistic and dissonant impositions.To begin to understand Pevsner and his impact. one has to go back to his early life in Germany. and that requires a considerable amount of contextualization. not least because it is difficult for readers today to appreciate fully the conditions of life in the years immediately before and after the First World War. without being supplied with a wide range of background information.This book does that. Not every topic referred to will be found useful by every reader: different topics will be of more value to some than others - but all have a legitimate place in this book.For example. comparing the religious make-up of Leipzig and of Pevsners school is significant because it shows that although there were very few Jewish pupils at the school of St Thomas. their representation was nine times greater than one would have imagined. pro rata to the number of Jews in Leipzig as a whole. This in turn is an indication of the fact that for aspirant Jewish families who wanted a ticket into mainstream (i.e. Lutheran) German society. gaining a place to the St Thomas school was a very attractive option. whereas for Catholics. who already had a place in German society but didnt aspire to Protestant culture. it was not. That seems like a reasonable point to make. just as it is reasonable to observe that Pevsners experience of one of Germanys top schools did indeed affect his thinking. and his values. and his view of himself. to the point that he considered his Russian-Jewish background a serious barrier to his progress and something that he urgently needed to shed. Figures help to make this point in a way that argumentation does not. and that is why they are quoted.The same is true of other passages of context. In addition to looking at Pevsners history. the book finds it necessary to show. for example. how the subject of art history was thought about at the time when Pevsner became interested in it. and how it. and his thinking. developed during his years as a student. a museum intern. an art journalist. and a lecturer. Since this is the first attempt to locate Pevsner in this way. and since Pevsner went on to develop parallel careers in a multitude of fields. its necessary to provide a considerable amount of background. some of which only overlaps when seen through Pevsners lens. Not all of it may interest everyone: thats OK. Nonetheless. it is all relevant. and much of it is only available to the reader in this book.On the question of the difficulties encountered in writing this book. and the time it has taken to write. when this book was originally commissioned. the bulk of the raw material was in London. where I lived and worked. and where I was working it as fast and as painstakingly as I could in my spare time. Within a year. it had all been sold by the Pevsner family and transferred to Los Angeles. I took advantage of an invitation to go and see exactly what the archive consisted - something Id never been able to find out previously - and only then discovered that it took up 70 feet of shelving. and that much of the early material was written in old-fashioned German lettering (Suetterlin). some of it almost indecipherable. and some of it in code. Over the course of one month. I started to decipher what I could. but given the extent of the documentation and the technical difficulties in dealing with it from more than 5.000 miles away. I eventually chose to mothball my research until I was in a position to come back to it.That didnt happen until 13 years later. since when Ive spent hundreds of hours working on it. Thats on top of interviews and correspondence with people who knew Pevsner. and research trips to the various places in Europe that he was connected with. Although it took 27 years for this first volume to emerge. the actual period of research and writing took 14 years. during which time I brought out six other books that were easier to work on. The cell-phone also took ten years longer to get to market than it should have done. thanks to the Senates failure to see the point of it; speed of production isnt necessarily the determinant of whats worthwhile.Im very happy to deal with other questions. and readers are welcome to contact me through my publisher. Continuum. or on this site. This is a book Im proud to have written. and I have no reason to want to change anything other than the odd error that should have been picked up at copy-editing stage. The only difficulty I concede is that because this first volume stops in 1933. parts of the book are involved in laying the groundwork for matters that will only become clear in later volumes. I can see. therefore. that some readers will only understand the connections when those subsequent volumes appear. I hope that I live long enough to write them. and readers long enough to read them.1 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Terribly written. badly arguedBy de omnibus dubitandum estThis is a strange book. spectacularly unsuited to its subject. Games was apparently unable to distinguish between important facts and unimportant facts. and this book - which only stretches up to age 30. before Pevsner arrived in England - is the consequence of his sievelessness. Many biographical details included in this book are not at all helpful; the book is crowded with them. This is not helped by his cloyingly impersonal (referring to the young Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as. "Nika") style. heaped upon the reader with little regard to clarity. For instance. take the following sentence concerning his early school life at the Thomasschule in Leipzig:"Most pupils were registered as Evangelical Lutheran (the mainstream Protestant religion in Saxony) while only a dozen boys were registered as Jewish and even fewer as Catholic - a quite different pattern from the demographics of Leipzig as a whole. which was made up of just under 470.000 Protestants. 7.000 Jews and 22.000 Catholics at the time."This is a sentence written by someone unable to let go of his research. and the entire book is made up of such preposterous statements. In Pevsners early school life there was a disproportionate dearth of Catholics. and...? And nothing.In many ways. the bad writing in this book arises from its authors inability to distinguish whether the book he was writing was a popular press book or a scholarly work. In his introduction (after loud. lengthy moans about having to travel to Los Angeles when the archive was sold to the Getty. though his trip was entirely paid for). he states that he is looking for biographical precedents in Pevsners life that would have affected Pevsners own approach to architecture. While it is interesting to know that when the Pevsners came to England they were alarmed at the shoddy quality of the buildings. Games often takes this biographical approach to the point where it becomes farce - where points such as about the dearth of Catholics in his school could potentially have transformed his entire career. This is a rather simple-minded approach. and it is no accident that after twenty-five years of research. unable as he was to distinguish the important parts from the unimportant parts of the Pevsner archive. Games has only been able to produce a volume on Pevsners first thirty years.There are few second-order accounts of Pevsners life and it is a real shame that this is one of the few existing. especially since Games has a good attitude towards Pevsner - he believes in Pevsner. Maybe when "Pevsner: The Middle Life" comes out in 2035. it will be better.1 of 2 people found the following review helpful. A refreshing analysis of German art history in the Weimar yearsBy Miss SparrowThis book defied my expectations of what art history was about in the 1920s and 30s. Andrew Saint. reviewing it in "Architecture Today" (Vol 209. June 2010) describes as a "triumph" the picture it gives of "German cultural and academic life" in the Weimar years. Through the personality of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner - then an art historian. later one of the worlds most influential architectural historians and critics - it brings to life issues that existed in Germany "with verve. passion and detail"."Pevsner - The Early Life: Germany and Art" is the first volume of a scholarly biography of a leading academic. Born to Russian-Jewish parents in Germany in 1902. Nikolaus Pevsner was attracted to the dominant issues of German and Italian identity in art. and imagined that he might even perform a mediating role once the Nazis came to power. He was of course wrong. and by the end of 1933 - which is where this first volume ends - was having to decide whether to try and remain in Germany as an unwanted Jew (in spite of his conversion to Christianity as a student) or emgrigate to an English-speaking country.How had he navigated the previous 31 years of his life? Who were the major influences on him? What had he already achieved? August Schmarsow. once as important as Wouml;lfflin and Riegl. regarded the young Pevsner as his successor. This book examines Pevsners scholarly awakening. his gravitation towards Italian art and the way his vision of modernism fell squarely within the goals of German national resurgence and its opposition to France.It also talks about the extraordinary dilemma that existed for Jews like Pevsner who wanted to be German. so they could escape from their Russian and Polish origins. but who could never be German enough to satisfy the German right.Both as a study of Pevsner and as a study of his times. this is a terrific book. I highly recommend it.