Pelican History of Art

Allen Lane approached Nikolaus Pevsner in 1945 for a series of illustrated books that would match the success of the King Penguins. Pevsner recalled his response: "Allen said, 'You have done the King Penguins now and we are going on with them, but if you had your way, what else would you do?' I had my answer ready—and the answer was very formidable, because I outlined both The Pelican History of Art and The Buildings of England on the spot, each about 40 to 50 volumes. Allen said, 'Yes, we can do both,' and that was the end of the meeting."^[5] Pevsner's industry quickly bore fruit with the first contracts signed by 1946 for John Summerson's Architecture in Britain, Anthony Blunt's Art and Architecture in France, and Rudolf Wittkower's Italian art and architecture, the first title Painting in Britain, 1530–1790 by Ellis Waterhouse was issued in 1953. By 1955, Pevsner produced a prospectus for the series announcing the publication of four new volumes and a plan for the rest of the series totalling 47 titles. The ambition of the series exceeded previously published multi-volume histories of art such as André Michel's Histoire de l'art (17 vols., 1905–28), the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte (25 vols., 1923–35). Forty-one volumes were published by the time Pevsner retired from editing in 1977. His work was continued by Judy Nairn (his editorial assistant on the Buildings of England) and the medievalist Peter Lasko. Yale University Press acquired the series in 1992 when 45 titles had been completed; by 2004 they had published 21 volumes, mostly revisions of existing editions.^[6] New volumes continued to be produced up to the mid-2010s, alongside new editions of older ones.^[7]

For Penguin the series was a departure from their commercial mainstay of paperbacks as the histories of art were the first large format, illustrated hardback books they had produced.^[8] Despite their relatively high price they were a financial success, yet for Pevsner they were intended primarily as graduate level texts in what was, for the English speaking world, the newly emerging academic discipline of art history.^[9] Nevertheless, the series was criticised from within the academy for its evident biases. Many of its authors were German émigrés, consequently there was a methodological preference for the kunstwissenschaft practiced in Vienna and Berlin between the wars; a formalism that ignored the social context of art.^[10] Robert Branner thus ended his review of Paul Frankl's volume on Gothic architecture by saying that although the book “has much to offer,” it “should bear an imprint date not of 1962, but of 1920.”^[11] This sense of datedness was compounded later, as most of the Yale volumes reprinted older Pelicans with only minor changes from their original 1950s–70s text, although Paul Crossley did add a lengthy historiographic foreword to his revision of Frankl's volume in particular.

Moreover, the weight given to some subjects seemed disproportionate to some critics, with seven of its original 47 volumes dedicated to English art, a "tributary of the main European current" as the Burlington Magazine observed.^[12] After the series moved to Yale, the revised plan folded much of English art back into the pan-European volumes.^[13]

Though the 1955 plan was never fully executed—the volumes on Greek painting and sculpture, quattrocento painting and cinquecento sculpture were not written—the Pelican History remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of world art published.

• Oxford History of Art
• Thames & Hudson's World of Art