Nikolaus Pevsner - Post-war

Post-war

In 1946, Pevsner made the first of several broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme, presenting nine talks in all up to 1950, examining painters and European art eras. By 1977 he had presented 78 talks for the BBC including the Reith Lectures in 1955 – a series of six broadcasts, titled The Englishness of English Art, for which he explored the qualities of art which he regarded as particularly English, and what they said about the English national character. His A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., were published in 1976 as A History of Building Types.

Pevsner was a founding member in 1957 of The Victorian Society, the national charity for the study and protection of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts. In 1964 he was invited to become its chairman, and steered it through its formative years, fighting alongside John Betjeman, Hugh Casson and others to save houses, churches, railway stations and other monuments of the Victorian age. He served for ten years (1960–70) as a member of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (or Coldstream Committee), campaigning for art history to be a compulsory element in the curriculum of art schools. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1965 and awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1967. Having assumed British citizenship in 1946, Pevsner was awarded a CBE in 1953 and was knighted in 1969 'for services to art and architecture'.

Lola Pevsner died in 1963. Pevsner himself died in London in August 1983 and his memorial service was held at the Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury the following December, with the memorial address being given by Alec Clifton-Taylor, a friend of fifty years. He is buried in the churchyard of St Peter, Clyffe Pypard in Wiltshire.