Dealing with the visual

Few art historians of the twentieth century shaped their field as deeply as Nikolaus Pevsner. He pioneered new lines of inquiry, transformed the study of architecture in England, and helped found design history as a discipline. His talks and radio broadcasts, along with the Buildings of England guides, which brought him lasting fame, drew a broad public toward art and buildings.

This collection of essays grew out of a conference at Birkbeck held to mark the hundredth anniversary of Pevsner's birth. It is the first extended critical evaluation of his work. Leading scholars from several countries contribute, and the volume gathers much new material on Pevsner's thinking and the intellectual climate that formed it, in Germany during the late 1920s and 1930s and in England during the 1940s and 1950s.