Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things. An attempt to establish criteria by which the aesthetic qualities of design can be judged is a booklet (20 pages, 18 x 12.2 cm) written in 1946 by the emigrated architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983), published with the aim of aesthetic education and teacher training: “No Education is complete which does not include the appreciation of design in all its aspects – architecture, town, country planning and the fine and industrial arts”. This motto introduces the booklet, which was published in the Council for Visual Education (C.V.E.) series.
Nikolaus Pevsner, who was actually a specialist in painting and architecture of the 17th century, qualified himself as an expert in design and taste with his books Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936) and An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (1937).

In his foreword, the art historian Herbert Read, who was vice-chairman of the C.V.E., supports the publication of the booklet by referring to the increasing importance of and sensitivity for design in British society: “To arouse that sense of beauty, to instill it into our educational system and our planning authorities, is the purpose of the Council for Visual Education. It is part of the policy of this Council to issue from time to time pamphlets which will be of some guidance to teachers, lecturers, and all who are concerned in laying the aesthetic foundation of our future society.” (Read 1946, 2)

Pevsner asks how well-designed everyday things could be used by teachers for visual education and by what criteria they could be recognised as well-designed (Pevsner 1946, 4). Pevsner refers to the Circulation Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, where art schools, local museums and secondary schools could borrow objects, photographs and slides for demonstration purposes. Images of pots, dishes and pottery, as well as curtains and a radiogram, are used to show that “decorative qualities exist independently of functional qualities” (15). Pevsner placed “qualities of proportion, composition and the more complicated emotional qualities” (19) at the centre of a distinction between good and bad everyday design. The drawing of a Jaguar car on the cover of the booklet sets the aesthetic tone and exemplifies the aesthetic design praised by the author.

In the same year that Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things was published, Nikolaus Pevsner, together with the textile designers Margaret Leischner and Enid Marx among others, was part of a team of specialists sent to post-war Germany by the British military intelligence service’s British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee (BIOS) with the aim of investigating German product design in industrial enterprises in the American and British occupation zones. It is worth noting that both Pevsner and Leischner obtained British citizenship in the course of these BIOS trips, enabling them to travel abroad as members of military intelligence (Sudrow 2012, 111). For Pevsner, this mission, and his own personal mission to guide British taste, go hand in hand with the development of his interest in conducting research in his country of exile.

The habilitated art historian Nikolaus Pevsner was a private lecturer at Göttingen University when he was dismissed because of his Jewish origins in 1933 on the basis of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. After emigrating to England – he had already been there for a short research stay in 1930 – Pevsner was commissioned by the Department of Trade Economics at Birmingham University to conduct an industrial sociological study of companies in the Midlands. Anne Sudrow writes: “Employing the recently developed methods of empirical social research, with which he familiarised himself in Birmingham, he explored the standards and practices of industrial design in British consumer goods firms. He conducted approximately two hundred interviews with entrepreneurs and managers, wholesalers and retailers as well as artists and artistic consultants working as product designers.” (Sudrow 2012, 108) His findings, published as An Enquiry into Industrial Art (1937) by Cambridge University Press, formulated a critique of the aesthetics and form of contemporary British design. Parallel to this was his book Pioneers of the Modern Movement. From William Morris to Walter Gropius, published by Faber & Faber in 1936, in which Pevsner drew a line between the sophisticated design principles of the Arts and Crafts movement in 19th-century Britain and continental modernism, especially the Bauhaus art school.

Pevsner’s empirical design research laid the foundations for both his later work for the Council for Visual Education and his involvement with the BIOS mission in Germany. Although Pevsner’s critical approach did generate dissenting voices, he received a great deal of encouragement, for example from Herbert Read, but also from the furniture entrepreneur Gordon Russel, who hired Pevsner as a consultant on design issues in 1935 (Muthesius 1990, 190). Gordon Russel later became the second head of the Council of Industrial Design. As deputy director of the Architectural Review from 1941 to 1945, Pevsner was able to have a direct impact on the public perception of architecture and design. At the same time, he taught at Birkbeck College. From the late 1940s, Pevsner was Slade Professor, first at Cambridge, then later at Oxford.

Pevsner was not only an émigré who was able to secure his professional reputation institutionally, he also remained closely networked with the émigré community. He was one of the guests present at the Farewell Dinner for Walter Gropius, the send-off to the USA of the architect who had emigrated to London in 1937. After the outbreak of the war, Pevsner spent some time as an enemy alien in Huyton Camp, Liverpool, where the architect Harry Seidler, the artists Hugo Dachinger and Walter Nessler and the choreographer Kurt Joos were also interned (Feather 2004). It was at Huyton Camp that the idea for Pevsner's successful book An Outline of European Architecture was born, published by Penguin in 1943 and translated into numerous languages. Pevsner wrote art criticism for the émigré newspaper Die Zeitung, to which Walter Trier and Richard Ziegler contributed cartoons. The exiled art historian Rosa Schapire worked for Pevsner’s The Buildings of England series (Pevsner 1954), which he had been developing since 1945 and which looked at the building tradition of his new homeland across English counties and villages. Volume 1 of the series was published in 1951 and almost 50 volumes were produced during his lifetime, of which he was the sole author of 38.

Like other intellectuals and scientists – such as the zoologist Julian Huxley – Pevsner used the new information media to popularise his approaches. Pevsner had been on the air at the BBC since 1946, and his 1955 series of lectures on “Englishness of English Art” appeared in print a year later and was evidence of his continuing preoccupation with the history of architecture and design in his country of exile. In the preface Pevsner writes: “Here it is my sole intention to answer the question which might well be asked, why I should have set myself up as judge of English qualities in English art, being neither English-born nor English-bred, having entered England only at the age of twenty-eight and lived in the country not much longer than twenty years. Twenty years is admittedly not a long time to learn to understand a country. On the other hand my antecedents might be accepted as specially useful for the task. For one thing the very fact of having come into a country with fresh eyes at some stage, and then of having settled down gradually to become part of it, may constitute a great advantage. As for my own professional career I had worked on Saxon Baroque architecture at Leipzig and Dresden, and then on Italian Baroque painting, before I first reached England in 1930. The contrast was complete, and it was, against all expectations, agreeable too. Stimulated by this accidental demonstration of opposite national qualities in art, I began to collect material on the subject of this book.” (Pevser 1956, 9) His foreword expresses the view of the emigrant who notices aspects that others may not notice.
In 1969, Nikolaus Pevsner was knighted, an honour also bestowed on the exiled art historian Ernst H. Gombrich. In 2007, an English Heritage blue plaque was mounted on Pevsner’s home at 2 Wildwood Terrace in Hampstead, where he lived from 1936 until his death in 1983 (Waite 2007).