Posts Tagged Biography
Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life by Susie Harries – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 6, 2011
A towering account of the German-born scholar who chronicled England's most significant buildings is no more than he deserves
"It takes earnestness to make a man and diligence to make a genius," Pevsner noted at 20, and he had plenty of both. He'd started writing historical dramas at seven, and a diary begun in his teens recorded the lifelong anxieties and emotional insecurities that tend to come with precocity of this order.
A Protestant convert, like many of his kind in the early 20th century (his father was a prosperous Russian-Jewish fur trader), he developed an intense patriotism, and in his case quasi-spiritual convictions about the Germanness of German art. For Pevsner, a kind of instinctual, apolitical socialist, national feeling was coupled with a sense of social responsibility, and dislike of the unhealthy values he saw in Weimar Germany.
So it was that in its early days National Socialism held no terrors for him, and he was slow to perceive the devilry of the Nazi creed.
Only when threatened with dismissal from his academic post did he join the flood of émigrés to England, though even then he was still sending his children on German holidays on the brink of war in 1939, and in touch with leading pro-Nazi art historians. His apparent obtuseness, Harries suggests in subtly analytical pages on his supposed fascistic inclinations, was due less to wilful blindness than to a lifelong political innocence and reluctance to cut ties with his homeland.
England proved a shock and, in social terms, a puzzle. Like Soviet Jewish pianists or violinists in Israel in later years, art historical refugees from Hitler were two a penny, and Pevsner endured years of penury and humble work, including as an adviser on household design ("the more art is applied to an article the worse its appearance becomes"), before his ascent to panjandrum status ("Is it in Pevsner?"), and eventual knighthood.
His success came not by social contacts – on the contrary, he was accused of having too few aristocratic acquaintances and of omitting grand country houses from his work for leftwing reasons – but by the manic diligence he was to show in the 23 years it took to compile the 46 volumes of The Buildings of England. He was most at home in churches, which he would root about tirelessly, "capital by bloody capital", though not entirely for spiritual reasons: "Really, the uses some people put these places to," he was heard to say when a service in progress obliged him to wait.
Culture clashes with the locals are entertainingly documented. In England art history was often an amateur affair, carried on with nonchalance, effortless superiority and class pretension, a place where folk such as John Betjeman (a modestly born social alpinist aware that his own name was of German origin) smirked about "Herr Doktor Professor", and where the very term Kunstforschung – art research – was thought frightfully amusing. "It was partly banter," Pevsner noted, "but not all banter." He was getting to understand the English.
Impressed nonetheless by innovative forms of popularising the arts in museums and lectures, under pressure from the BBC and others, he did his best to lighten the tone of his talks and articles, without succumbing to the personalised approach he found tiresome. Gradually his style, accent and all, found an audience, and numerous outlets, the Reith lectures included.
The feuds that assailed him, chiefly about his early book Pioneers of the Modern Movement, were one-sided affairs, in which he rarely hit back. Gropius was always his hero, which brought suspicions of continental theorising, inhuman functionalism and dangerous doctrines about the moral responsibilities of artists. He had definite, though unpredictable tastes, hating both brutalism and the flamboyant art deco of the Hoover building, and preferring more humdrum, workaday modern styles.
At the same time he involved himself in conservation battles, as postwar reconstruction, then 60s insouciance, conspired to obliterate outstanding Victorian buildings, and pulling down Covent Garden was seriously considered.
In the Nazi years it was better to be dépaysé abroad than in your own country, yet despite his English successes all his professional life you sense in Pevsner a certain homesickness. For us at least the conflict of national intellectual styles he represented was hugely beneficial. The irony of a "Prussian pedant" lecturing the English on Englishness, for which he was mocked, resolves itself in the fact that, together with Gombrich in art history and Weidenfeld in publishing, Pevsner was one of a golden generation of German/Austrian Jewish refugees who did much to give their adopted country the bottom it prided itself on already possessing.
Harries guides us through treacherous territory, of race, class, politics and artistic and intellectual intrigue, in a sure-footed manner. There is empathy with her subject, who had a kindly side (a "benign spider" someone called him), but her judgments are balanced by a cool and compendious intelligence, together with rare explanatory powers.
Intellectual movements, art politics, wartime history, a great man's unsteady emotional life – there is too much in this 800-page book even to evoke here. It is long because it is rich with things to tell and to say. A perfect blend of events, ideas and personal narrative, it is a masterpiece of the biographical genre 20 years in the making. As with much of Pevsner himself, no one, you feel, could have done it better.
Edinburgh book and film festivals to join forces
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 17, 2010
Architect Norman Foster and author Margaret Atwood to spearhead partial tie-up between festivals
Norman Foster and Margaret Atwood are to star in a collaboration between two of Edinburgh's largest festivals as part of a new initiative to expand the reach and audience of the city's international book festival.
In a joint project with the Edinburgh film festival this August – the first on this scale attempted by two of the city's 12 annual festivals – Foster and Atwood will be amongst a number of prominent guests exploring the different techniques film-makers and writers use for biographies.
The events will be staged at the Filmhouse cinema complex, where this year's film festival is now taking place, as part of plans by the new director of the city's international book festival, Nick Barley, to develop an event based for nearly 30 years in a "tented city" in the gardens of Charlotte Square in the city's Georgian New Town.
Barley unveiled his first programme today, which features 750 authors. It includes a rare public appearance by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau in conversation with Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, three Nobel prize winners, including Joseph Stiglitz, the poet Seamus Heaney, the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon and an opening debate on Jesus between the atheist author Philip Pullman and former bishop of Oxford Richard Harries.
The former chancellor Alistair Darling is to give his first speech on politics and the economy since Labour lost the general election, while seven leading South African poets and writers prevented from attending this year's London book fair by the Icelandic ash cloud will fly in for a series of events.
The Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas, author of a controversial novel on race and class, The Slap, and the first Edinburgh Unesco City of Literature writer in residence, will be speak on the opening day. The festival closes with a discussion on "the new world order" and geo-politics – a theme of this year's festival – with the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago.
Foster, one of Britain's most famous architects and designer of Wembley stadium, the Reichstag, the British Museum's "great court" and one of the towers at "ground zero" in New York, is appearing at the UK launch of his biography How much does your building weigh Mr Foster? It has been made into a feature-length film by the Art Commissioners consultancy.
Atwood will appear at the joint book and film festival event by satellite link from Canada, to talk about her recent novel The Year of the Flood. Other major names for this mini-festival are to be announced next month.
There had been speculation that Barley would move events outside Charlotte Square, or even relocate it entirely. In an interview with the Guardian, Barley said he was committed to remaining there. "It provides an oasis of calm in the chaos and bustle and joy of the rest of the festivals, and I'm not interested in changing that," he said. "Having said that, I'm perfectly happy doing things elsewhere and collaborating with other festivals."
He suggested the festival could even eventually colonise surrounding roads on Charlotte Square with marquees, closing two sides to traffic, if the city council agreed.
Barley said his revamped programme featured five "innovations", among them the idea of inviting four guest "selectors", including Bell, Ruth Padel, great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and Don Paterson, the poet, to invite writers and cartoonists to take part in different strands of the festival.
The four worked on the themes of poetry, political satire and cartoonists, the future of fiction, and the relations between parents and their children. The latter theme, co-curated by Padel, will culminate in a debate between Fay Weldon and Fatima Bhutto, niece of the assassinated Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto and daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, who was shot dead by police, about the tragic and violent loss of a parent.
Barley said this model would be followed at future festivals. A novice at directing festivals and given only seven months since his appointment last October to build this year's programme, Barley denied the guest curators were there to help lighten his workload. His predecessor, Catherine Lockerbie, credited with building Edinburgh's reputation as the world's largest book festival, stepped down last year after being seriously ill with stress and exhaustion.
"Far from being a lightening of the load, it has been an increasing of the workload but a joyful one," he said. "The key to it has not so much been a lightening of the load but about acknowledging that choosing 750 events from one person's head is a particular thing, and I'm interested in a variety of perspectives on the world."
Other strands include week-long themes such as the US's role in the world. This strand will feature 45 American authors such as Trudeau, Lionel Shriver, Joyce Carol Oates and David Vann, chaired by the BBC journalist Allan Little. There will also be a focus on first books by new writers, a "first book award" chosen by the festival audience, and a series of free evening events hosted by as yet undisclosed writers, musicians and cartoonists.
Barley said he had no plans for an overnight revolution in the way the festival was staged. But he said there was a pressing need to innovate, partly to see off competition from other events. In 1983, there were only four literature festivals in the UK. There are now nearly 400. "I do envisage many, many new innovations," he said. "We're very friendly with all the other festivals in the UK and abroad, but we're very aware we have to keep innovating to stay ahead."
Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic | Book review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 22, 2010
Norman Foster is a fascinating character, but this isn't quite the biography he deserves
It was the misfortune of Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan, that his £37m Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a 62-metre-high pyramid that would host the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions and house a 1,500-seat opera house, should open in the same year – 2006 – as the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat, of course, was not really Kazakh, but somehow he seized the world's imagination rather more vigorously. The pyramid, an aloof and scaleless thing, seemed to have the same preposterous wannabe spirit as the film character, but without the charm.
This is a comparison you will not find in Deyan Sudjic's Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture. Foster was the architect of the pyramid. Sudjic, formerly of this parish, is an insightful and engaging writer whose eye for absurdity wouldn't usually pass up one like this. But this book obeys different rules to previous works such as The Edifice Complex or The 100 Mile City.
Described as a biography "of one of the world's foremost architects, written with his full co-operation", it tells the story of how Foster worked his way up and out of a terraced house near a railway viaduct in Levenshulme, Greater Manchester. It reveals an early environment marked by poverty of aspiration as much as by material lack, and charts Foster's progress from there to Manchester University, Yale, leadership of a huge business, a seat in the Lords and an array of honours.
It takes in the key projects along the way: the most sensational building Ipswich has seen and ever will see; a cool hangar for art at the University of East Anglia; the tower of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong, and so on to the Gherkin, Wembley stadium, the Great Court of the British Museum, the Hearst tower in New York, the breathtaking Millau viaduct, and Beijing airport. It finishes with Masdar, the zero-carbon "city" that Foster is designing in Abu Dhabi.
Sudjic explains how Foster has helped to transform his profession. When he started out, it was largely a gentlemanly, small-scale business, a sort of cottage industry with a strong emphasis on the handicraft of models and drawings. Projects outside an architect's country were the exception. An architect of Foster's standing might have staff that could be measured in the dozens at most. Today, Foster's practice employs well over 1,000 people.
The book tells this story clearly and it makes a good introduction to Foster. What it lacks is a sense of revelation. It touches on some of the more sensitive issues in Foster's career, but it accepts the official version. These issues include the housing in Milton Keynes to which pitched roofs had to be added, the expense of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the wobble in the wobbly bridge, the building of monuments for the dubious Kazakh regime, the break-up of his partnership with Richard Rogers, and the later departure of his partner Ken Shuttleworth.
Foster, mostly presented as master of all he touches, is described as having been "caught up unwittingly" in the Golden Orange project in Moscow, in which the Tretyakov Gallery, home of the finest collection of constructivist art in the world, was to be demolished and absorbed into a commercial development that looked like a pile of orange segments. It's not that Foster has to always come out badly, but one expects such episodes to be examined.
Sudjic also skirts over Foster's personal life. The traumatic death from cancer of his first wife, Wendy, is described quite briefly. His colourful second wife, Sabiha, gets only a line, an exclusion in which one might detect the influence of his third wife, Elena. The book is more revealing about Foster's relationship with his hardworking and thwarted parents, which is shown to be distant and a little regretful, but not without affection.
The most touching moment comes when Foster flies to Australia to see his uncle, in order to find out more about his long-dead mother, in particular whether she was adopted as a child. When he gets there, the uncle's mind is missing. The matron in the nursing home advises Foster to wait for one of the uncle's lucid days, but the next day he dies.
Foster's personal life is none of our business, except that we expect such things in biographies. But the book could also be more challenging in its architectural criticism. For most of Foster's career, the most common objection to his work has been that it is "grey". Is this fair? More recently, he has discovered extravagant forms, especially in his Russian projects, such as the vast silver obelisk of the Russia Tower, or Crystal Island, a sci-fi glass tent the size of four Pentagons. Are these projects anything other than megalomaniac bling? Conceivably, yes, but the question has to be asked.
In other words, this official biography is too official. Timed to coincide with Foster's 75th birthday, it sounds too much like a speech at the party. It is to Foster as the pyramid is to President Nazarbayev: a monument to a great leader that doesn't quite tell the whole story. The Foster way is to smooth conflict and contradictions into a neutral appearance, to turn chaos into order, but this should not extend to the writing of a book about him.
It is a shame. Foster is one of the most remarkable people this country has produced in modern times. He is also a fascinating character for a biography. He is big enough to withstand a more robust treatment, which would indeed be a heightened form of respect. Excessive deference is a vice of too much architectural writing in Britain and it is to the benefit of neither author nor subject that it should be so prevalent here.
Rowan Moore is the Observer's architecture critic
Response: Though I didn’t have his diaries, my biography of Nikolaus Pevsner is still reliable
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 27, 2010
My sources are legitimate. I've interviewed those who knew him and accessed his archive
Rosemary Hill must have good judgment as a historian: she has won a prize for her book on Stonehenge and enjoyed praise for her study of Augustus Pugin. But she doesn't give that impression in her review of my new book Pevsner – The Early Life: Germany and Art (The adopted Englishman, Review, 10 July).
She is aware, for example, that in writing this first volume of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's first-ever biography, I haven't had access to his diaries. She therefore says, vaguely but insidiously, that I "make grave insinuations knowing that much of the evidence is missing". In doing so she makes three "grave insinuations" of her own: that what I've written is suspect; that without the diaries I've been handicapped; and that my knowledge of that handicap should have held me back.
Of course I'd love to have had the diaries, but it's wrong that nothing else matters or that, in Hill's words, only "in the diaries [Pevsner] kept at the time" is there "the evidence that would confirm or refute" conclusions sourced from elsewhere.
It's entirely possible to know about Pevsner from other sources. Mine include the 70 shelf-feet of papers in the Pevsner archive in Los Angeles, the archives of the many bodies he was associated with, a mass of official documents, his own privately circulated family history, and the memories of the people I've talked to who knew him in Germany, including his wife's sister, two first cousins, surviving former students in Göttingen, and contemporaries from his schooldays in Leipzig.
These sources aren't illegitimate or inadequate, as Hill implies. In fact, they often provide an independent means of testing what Pevsner said about himself. If Hill has a basis for discounting them, I'd be the first to make appropriate corrections, but she shouldn't sound alarm bells just because she doesn't like what the best available evidence currently shows.
Equally, it's essential not to borrow what Pevsner did later to explain what he did earlier and in different circumstances. Hill challenges evidence of Pevsner's political attitudes by offering readers a simplistic (and inaccurate) story, often trotted out, about how his behaviour in 1939 (six years after my book closes) proves that he was "simply naive about Nazism" in the early 1930s, adding tritely, "what other explanation is there?" Well, several.
She also makes her unfounded doubt about Pevsner's uncomfortable relations with his father into a giant doubt about the whole project, and minimises, in one grudging sentence, my achievement in "establishing the academic and intellectual context in which, in his twenties, Pevsner's career blossomed", when in fact this is the core of the book.
Hill has fallen back lazily on the very canards my research has challenged, and on the "imminent" appearance of another biography, based on the diaries, in which she has more trust. But that book hasn't appeared yet, and until it does its use as a yardstick for measuring an actual work is speculative and improper. Hill should know better.
Architecture, Art and design, Biography, Books, Comment, Culture, Germany, The Guardian, World news
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