WHAT NIKOLAUS PEVSNER BROUGHT WITH HIM FROM GERMANY




Lecture by Stephen Games


Nikolaus Pevsner was one of the 20th century's greatest celebrity scholars, dedicating his career to areas of architecture never fully documented before. One of those areas was the history of the Modern Movement, which he was also committed to promoting. Unusually, however, Pevsner had little background in this subject before moving to England in 1933 and publishing his famous 1936 study, Pioneers of the Modern Movement. His professional training lay in art history, which he'd studied at four German universities, practised as an intern at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, and then taught in Göttingen. How did Pevsner make the transition from art history to modern architecture, and what did he learn in Germany that shaped his later thinking?

LECTURER

Stephen Games is an author and editor. His most recent book - Pevsner - The Early Life: Germany and Art - is the first and long-awaited volume of the first ever biography of Pevsner. He has also edited one volume of Nikolaus Pevsner's radio lectures and four volumes of the prose works of John Betjeman. A former documentary maker for the BBC and arts correspondent of The Independent, Stephen's architectural reviews for The Guardian earned him a British Press Award. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and been deputy editor of the RIBA Journal. He was educated at the Central School of Art and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has recently lectured in architecture at Kent University, having previously taught at Boston University and Temple University, Philadelphia.