About Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British historian who specialised in the areas of art and architecture. He is best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951–1974), as well as his editorship of the Pelican History of Art. == Early life and career == Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony, into a Russian-Jewish family, the son of Anna (née Perlmann) and her husband Hugo Pevsner. He attended St. Thomas School, Leipzig, and went on to study at several universities, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the Humboldt University of Berlin and Goethe University Frankfurt, before being awarded a doctorate at Leipzig University in 1924 for a thesis on the Baroque architecture of Leipzig. In 1923, he married Carola ("Lola") Kurlbaum, the half-Jewish daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum. He worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928. He converted from Judaism to Lutheranism in young adulthood. During this period he became interested in establishing the supremacy of German modernist architecture after becoming aware of Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1925. In 1928, he contributed the volume on Italian baroque painting to the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, a multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art.
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