TY - JOUR
T1 - Nikolaus pevsner, photography, and the architecture of antoni gaudí
AU - Avilés, Pep
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the Department of Architecture, Penn State University (PSU), and a Getty Library Research Grant in 2019. Initial archival work in Washington, D.C., and New York was supported by the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship at Princeton University. The author would like to thank PSU librarians Henry Pisciotta and Rob Peterson for their help with access to key sources. 1. “[Los alemanes] no debían ocuparse de arte; entienden mucho de técnica y de matemáti-cas, pero el arte no es su punto fuerte. Y la arquitectura de ninguna manera.” Paul Linder, “Encuentros con Antoni Gaudí,” Mar del Sur, Revista Peruana de Cultura 10 (March–April 1950): 1–11, rev. and repr. in Joaquín Medina Warmburg, ed., Paul Linder 1897–1968: De Weimar a Lima: Antología de Arquitectura y Crítica (Madrid: Lamp-reave, 2019), 363–75. 2. Nikolaus Pevsner to Monroe Wheeler, 12 August 1947, Nikolaus Pevsner papers, 1903–1982, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (GRI), 840209, box 16, folder 9. 3. For a detailed account of MoMA’s edition whereabouts, see Irene Sunwoo, “Whose Design? MoMA and Pevsner’s Pioneers,” Getty Research Journal, no. 2 (January 2010): 69–82. 4. Nikolaus Pevsner to Monroe Wheeler, 24 August 1947, Pevsner papers, GRI, 840209, box 16, folder 9. 5. Nikolaus Pevsner to Philip Johnson; and Nikolaus Pevsner to Edgar Kaufmann Jr., 13 November 1947, Pevsner papers, GRI, box 16, folder 14. Pevsner suggests these comments were made by Johnson and Kaufmann (despite the documented animosity between the two characters). “I want to concentrate in the book on the main line of development more or less as I have drawn it. This is why I left out two main currents, namely: Art Nouveau developing into Expressionism (Gaudí); Art Nouveau developing into something quite close to the Modern Movement (Cologne Theatre); Neoclassicism developing into something close to the Modern Movement (your point about Mies).” 6. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1929), 88. During the early years of the CIAM encounters, mockery of architects whose work could be qualified as Expressionist (including Hugo Häring) was common among modern architects. See Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project (London: Academy, 1995); and Matthias Schirren, Hugo Härring: Architekt des neuen Bauens, 1882–1958 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Pep Avilés.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - International knowledge of the work of Antoni Gaudí increased during the postwar years and with it was an ongoing interest in positioning the work of the Catalan architect within modern historiography. The process of discovery and evaluation of Gaudí’s work by historian Nikolaus Pevsner began in 1947 during the first discussions concerning the production of the Museum of Modern Art edition of Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius; Pevsner’s preoccupation grew incrementally during the 1950s, becoming one of the most significant, albeit puzzling, additions to his work on modern architecture in the 1960s, when Pevsner argued that Gaudí was an “antipioneer” to the functional, progressive idea of modern architecture that he advocated for. Pevsner’s published selection of images on Gaudí’s architecture, which included photographs taken at a distance to portray complete buildings and those appropriated from popular postcards, often made his arguments look obsolete in comparison with the more progressive forms of photography that James Johnson Sweeney and Josep Lluís Sert, for instance, would use in their publications. This essay chronicles Pevsner’s changing attitudes toward Gaudí, borne out through multiple revised publications, to illuminate not only the attention given to Gaudí’s work in the two decades following the Second World War but also the evolving historical conditions for architecture and its criticism in this period.
AB - International knowledge of the work of Antoni Gaudí increased during the postwar years and with it was an ongoing interest in positioning the work of the Catalan architect within modern historiography. The process of discovery and evaluation of Gaudí’s work by historian Nikolaus Pevsner began in 1947 during the first discussions concerning the production of the Museum of Modern Art edition of Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius; Pevsner’s preoccupation grew incrementally during the 1950s, becoming one of the most significant, albeit puzzling, additions to his work on modern architecture in the 1960s, when Pevsner argued that Gaudí was an “antipioneer” to the functional, progressive idea of modern architecture that he advocated for. Pevsner’s published selection of images on Gaudí’s architecture, which included photographs taken at a distance to portray complete buildings and those appropriated from popular postcards, often made his arguments look obsolete in comparison with the more progressive forms of photography that James Johnson Sweeney and Josep Lluís Sert, for instance, would use in their publications. This essay chronicles Pevsner’s changing attitudes toward Gaudí, borne out through multiple revised publications, to illuminate not only the attention given to Gaudí’s work in the two decades following the Second World War but also the evolving historical conditions for architecture and its criticism in this period.
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U2 - 10.1086/716583
DO - 10.1086/716583
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85112026633
SN - 1944-8740
VL - 14
SP - 123
EP - 150
JO - Getty Research Journal
JF - Getty Research Journal
IS - 1
ER -