Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

KONDO, Ariyuki
teenth-century Nazarene painters to the contemporary design
attitudes and methods of the Bauhaus, but also to his discovery
of the Picturesque as ‘an extension backwards in time of the
features he had admired in English Arts and Crafts architecture
and design in Pioneers of the Modern Movement’ (Causey 2004:
169). In his extended study of the Picturesque in the 1940s, Pevsner
came to see that the essence of the Picturesque lay in its
‘artistic-design attitude’, viz., the timeless ‘modes’ and ‘habits’ of
viewing and considering external objects, not as a method limited
to the past; and was therefore not only worthy of being a
subject of historical study, but also a suitable attitude for solving
contemporary design problems.
In 1949, Pevsner published an article on Richard Payne Knight,
an eighteenth-century pioneer of the Picturesque, in The Art Bulletin
(Pevsner 1949). 4 In this article, he examines Knight’s idea
of the Picturesque through the use of various quotations from
Knight’s writings, and refers to the fact that Knight claimed the
Picturesque ‘only exist[s] in the modes and habits of viewing
and considering them[external objects]’ (Knight 1805: 196).
Knight’s view was an application of the empirical philosopher
David Hume’s contention that ‘Beauty is no quality in things
themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates
them, and each mind perceives a different beauty.’ (Hume 1757:
268) Through refusing to make distinctions between external
objects, Knight came to conceive of the Picturesque as arising
from the mind’s contemplation of external objects. It was this
Knightian understanding of the Picturesque from which Pevsner
developed his own understanding of the Picturesque.
Figure 2. Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Twentieth-century Picturesque: An Answer to Basil
Taylor’s Broadcast’, The Architectural Review (April 1954).
4 This article was later republished with some modifications as one of the chapters
of the first volume of his Studies in Art, Architecture and Design (1968).
Pevsner’s position on the Picturesque was expressed most
clearly and straightforwardly in his apology for it in the threepage
article ‘Twentieth-century Picturesque: An Answer to Basil
Taylor’s Broadcast’, published in the Architectural Review of April
1954 (fig. 2). Pevsner’s firm belief in the Picturesque as being
by far the greatestʺaccomplishment of English art was challenged
by art historian Basil Taylor of the Royal College of Art in
a radio broadcast, English Art and the Picturesque, in which ‘the
Picturesque’ was dismissed as ‘a sign of imperfect vision’, lacking
‘seriousness and truth’, which prevented ‘the English from
facing up to the realities of an industrial age’ and drew them into
‘irrelevancies and a nostalgia for the past’ (Pevsner 1954: 227).
Pevsner could not accept Taylor’s assertion, for the Picturesque
was, in his view, a thoroughly modern subject facing up to the realities
of modern society, never a subject of nostalgia. For example,
in various issues of The Architectural Review of 1944 (fig. 3),
of which Pevsner himself was the editor, articles on Picturesquerelated
subjects such as ‘Price on Picturesque Planning’, ‘Lord
Burlington’s Bijou, or Sharawaggi at Chiswick’ and ‘The Genesis of
the Picturesque’ appeared alongside articles on modern design
and contemporary design issues, e.g. Hugh Stubbins’s ‘wartime
housing’, Bernard Rudofsky’s housing design in São Paulo and
Oscar Niemeyer’s designs for residential projects in Rio de Janeiro.
5 Here one can see that Pevsner valued the Picturesque not
as a taste which belongs to a specific period in the past, but as
a concept with ‘modern’ significance. Later, in 1967, on the occasion
of his receiving of the gold medal of the Royal Institute of
British Architects (RIBA), Pevsner delivered an address in which
he identified modern functional design with the Picturesque, giving
as an example the newly completed functional, yet picturesque,
design of Churchill College, Cambridge (RIBA 1967: 318).
According to Pevsner, the key message of the eighteenth-century
pioneers of the Picturesque was ‘Keep your eyes open. See,
analyse what impresses you, and for what reasons. You will then
realize that we have available an infinitely richer body of materials
for artistic creation than classical theory would make you
believe. Use it in your work’; and he stressed that ‘To this day we
cannot do better than follow that advice’ (Pevsner 1954: 227).
What Pevsner focussed on in his study of theories of the Picturesque
was that the Picturesque is ‘the first feeling-your-way’
design attitude, a sustainable, workable discipline of inventing
works of design, not restricted to a certain period in the past.
6. Conclusion
Pevsner was utterly convinced that the art historian, whose subject
of interest is ‘the visual expression of the history of man’s
mind’ (Pevsner 1952: 162), could not and should not shut himself
off from contemporary needs. In Pevsner’s view, ‘one of the
most urgent tasks’ for twentieth-century historiography was
to ‘reconcile scholarship and direct utility’ (Naylor 2004: 179),
5 Niemeyer’s designs for Cavalcanti House (1940) and the architect’s own
house (1942), both in Rio de Janeiro, were featured in the May 1944 issue of the
Architectural Review.
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