Pevsner: The Complete Broadcast Talks

Architecture and Art on Radio and Television, 1945-1977

Stephen Games

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317081456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This book brings together the surviving texts of the 113 talks on art and architecture that we know of, given by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner on radio and television between 1945--1977. It includes the seven texts of the 1955 Reith Lectures in their original broadcast form, as well as lectures that Pevsner gave in German (for the BBC in London and RIAS in Berlin) and on the radio in New Zealand. These talks are important as an example of the attempt by the BBC in particular to provide intellectual programming for the mass population. The talks are important for what they reveal about changing tastes in the treatment of the arts as a broadcast topic, as well as offering a case study of the development of one particular historian's approach to a subject that was gaining ground in universities as a direct result of his popularisation of it. They show what topics were thought to be central to the artistic agenda in the mid-years of the last century, whether from an academic or journalistic perspective, and reveal the mode and manner of academic engagement with the public over the period. Forty-six of these talks were published in 2002, on the centenary of Pevsner's birth, in a trade edition. At the time, his reputation as an active force in architectural thinking had long been eclipsed and interest in him had waned. Since then, there has been a turn-around in tastes and Pevsner's role within his chosen field is now being actively studied and discussed by a new generation for whom he is central to an understanding of the 20th century. There is therefore a real need for this book. In addition to containing twice the number of talks as the previous volume, it is supplemented with explanatory introductions, footnotes and citations. It also reveals, as far as this is possible, alternative versions of Pevsner's texts, as they appeared at different stages in the original production process. As such, this edition can be relied on by academics as scholarly and

1
Propaganda

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND LE CORBUSIER

Series: The Arts (3)

BBC Home Service · Friday 9 February 1945 · 10.30–10.50 pm

Producer: Unknown¹

Nikolaus Pevsner’s first radio broadcast was a straightforward elaboration of what Modern architecture meant, in a strand called ‘The Arts’, subtitled ‘A Fortnightly Miscellany of Talks’. ‘The Arts’ brought together pairs of speakers to give ten-minute presentations on related subjects. In this particular programme, broadcast two months before the end of the Second World War, the first speaker was Philip James. James was art director of the body that would become the Arts Council the following year but which had been set up by the government as CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) in 1940 to promote and defend British culture in the face of wartime demoralisation, weariness and scepticism.

James had commissioned a pamphlet and touring exhibition called ‘Plans for an Arts Centre’. This was ‘designed to show how the arts can be accommodated in a medium size town … a town where it is not economically possible to run a separate theatre, art gallery and hall for concerts’.² His commission was a response to an article in 1943 complaining about the absence of planning policy in the arts and ‘the dispersal of the public library down one street, the art gallery (if any) down another, the workingmen’s club somewhere else’.

In describing the proposal on the radio, James was down to earth and specific about what an arts centre might consist of; Pevsner, speaking second, was imprecise and superficial. His introduction to the idea of a modern architectural idiom credited Frank Lloyd Wright with having laid the groundwork for Le Corbusier’s flat roofs and bare walls and described the architecture of both as a new type of poetry, which could be thrilling ‘if we want it’.

To some extent, Pevsner—a novice broadcaster—was the victim of the BBC’s own attitudes. Aware of the Corporation’s centralising function in bringing the country together, and susceptible to fears about proletarian philistinism, BBC producers wanted to avoid the accusation that arts broadcasting was ‘arty’ and socially divisive. Against this background, Pevsner would have come under pressure to keep his message simple; he was also a good mimic and had a sense of what the BBC required of him.

Pevsner was not, however, a natural on the wireless. Although a talented communicator in the lecture room, he did not have the intimacy that radio requires. He was too aware of the gap between what he knew and what his audience knew, and of his obligation to educate. What he would offer to radio later in his career was authority, but at this stage he had not yet found his voice. As a result, although already highly regarded as a populariser, Pevsner in his first talk gave the impression of being genuinely aloof from his listeners, ill at ease explaining topics for which he and his audience had no common language, and fearful of saying anything that might be considered too challenging.

Pevsner’s appraisal of Wright and Le Corbusier, set in the days when discussion of the arts was still pre-Freudian, strikes today’s reader as disappointingly uncomplex. It also goes against the grain of Pevsner’s own beliefs. As a young man in Germany, he had passionately opposed Le Corbusier and his poetics in a way that British modernists did not. He thought that the main purpose of the new architecture was to solve social problems, not indulge in aesthetic whims. And yet what we see in this talk is Pevsner self-consciously adopting a public position that was identical with the British take on mainstream Modern thinking and advancing views that he did not hold but that served his purpose.

One curiosity in the talk that follows is Pevsner’s reference to television and his view of it as a more natural medium for communicating with the masses than radio. Television was still in its infancy and unavailable at the time of this talk, following the BBC’s shut-down of its experimental broadcasts during the war. Television returned in 1946 but although Pevsner saw the value in it, he did not graduate to it in the way that several of his contemporaries did, most notably the art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–83) who in 1969 presented his series on Civilisation. Pevsner only ever gave two television broadcasts, both 10 years later and both for the producer Naomi Capon, but these were not followed up by other producers, although a small number of programmes were subsequently made with him and about his work.

I’ve listened to Philip James as you have, but I’ve also seen the model of an Art Centre—even without queuing—and you haven’t.³ And I can tell you it’s excellent architecture—light, airy, informal and thoroughly modern. But if I say modern, what do I mean? It’s difficult to explain without television; but if you need to see architecture to appreciate it, at least I can talk round the subject. I can talk about architects, and the two I have chosen are, I think, about the most significant, the most influential of all architects now alive.

Frank Lloyd Wright is 75 years old, Le Corbusier is 57.⁴ Wright started to shock America nearly 50 years ago, Le Corbusier’s clashes with the philistines of Europe are all post-last-war. Wright belongs to the Middle West. Two generations ago his clan, Welsh Unitarians, settled in Wisconsin, a robust bearded lot, strong at tree-felling and strong at hymn-singing. The boy grew up with the cattle, the flowers of the hedgerow and the smell of fresh-sawn timber.

Le Corbusier comes from La [Chaux-de-Fonds]ⁱ in French-speaking Switzerland, the centre of Swiss watch-making, an atmosphere precise and rigidly Calvinist.

Wright is warm-hearted, bubbling over, vast and vague. Le Corbusier is as sharp as a razor blade, with a mind flashing and glittering like polished steel.

So they are very different in upbringing and character. But they have two things in common—two things specially important to us over here.

They both believe in our age.

And they are both poets.

As for the first, you know what I mean by architecture of our age as against architecture of the past.

There is an idiom, of our age, which has been created by Frank Lloyd Wright and a few others, and which was created as long ago as 1900, an idiom which no architect has enriched more than Le Corbusier. You recognise this idiom just as easily as you recognise Norman or Gothic. You recognise it by its flat roofs, its long bands of windows, its absence of decoration and mouldings, etc., etc.⁵ And you also know that the nineteenth-century had no such original idiom, but kept on imitating the styles of the past, and that most of the really successful architects of today in Britain, in America, in France, in Russia do that still. But both Wright and Le Corbusier know that it is a grievous symptom of sickness in an age, not to be able to produce an idiom of its own in the arts, and especially in that most social of all the arts: in architecture.

In engineering we have such an idiom. Just think of the magnificent swoop of our bridges. And in fact Wright in his autobiography compares the spirit of his buildings with the spirit of the liner, the aeroplane and the car. Le Corbusier does the same in his books. But being the radical Calvinist that he is, he goes on to say that a house should be a machine to live in.

I wish he had never printed that. It is blatant nonsense and has done no end of harm to a good cause. For it means people think that you can only choose between a Corbusier machine and a sham Tudor or sham Georgian home.

They think poetry in building consists in the make-believe of a romantically distorted past.

The reverse is true. Wright’s houses and Le Corbusier’s houses may function all right, but what makes them worth talking about is that—apart from that—they are works of art.

That brings me to point number two—that both Wright and Le Corbusier are poets—poets in architecture. Wright has said that: ‘The conception of a house is a poetic idea. The building of it—is romance.’ And Le Corbusier, when he was questioned on this point, has said ‘Yes—I want to create poems.’

Now how few of our modern architects would say that. Most of the ones who believe in our age, who want to be more than dress-makers, would be ashamed or afraid of owning up to romance and poetry. They have their noses to the grindstone of utility. And in many ways that is a very good thing. For we have still plenty of slums, plenty of slummy offices and factories and out-of-date schools and hospitals. But romance and poetry mustn’t be forgotten. Or, in the end, we’ll have a mechanised and sterilized utopia without anything imaginative, playful,—in short, without anything human.ⁱ

How do these qualities show in the buildings of Wright and Le Corbusier?

Wright is almost exclusively a designer of houses. They keep close to the ground, spread out freely and symmetrically over the plains of the Middle West, or cling to the multiform hills of Pennsylvania or California.

They consist of rooms flowing into each other, rooms with various outlines to avoid anything box-like, rooms with terraces at different levels, and roof-slabs hovering over them. Wright has a great faith in the nature of materials. He has worked in brick, in timber, in freestone, and in concrete, and always tries to give each material its due.

Le Corbusier is almost exclusively the man of concrete. His houses are all white (as long as they are clean, that is), with vast shining glass surfaces, with walls curved this way and that, with sweeping ship-ladder-like stairs or ramps, often with the main floor on stilts so that all the space on the ground can be used as a covered playing space or for other purposes.

And his houses, just as Wright’s, keep up the closest relations with nature. A terrace may be built right over a waterfall in a Wright house or an outer staircase may spin right round an old tree in something of Le Corbusier’s. Landscape and architecture are always conceived as one. Vegetation and man-made building materials complement each other.

So there you have adventure with the individual building, adventure in the way the building is placed—in nature; and you have adventure—at least in Le Corbusier—in the way buildings are grouped in the pattern of cities. Frank Lloyd Wright does...