JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. Design, New York, Frederick A. Praeger; London, Thames & Hudson, 1968. Pp. 216; 198 ills., 15 in color.In this as in most of his other writings, Pevsner seeks to identify what he calls "A Style for the Age." For Pevsner, the Age is at all times the hard reality which man must comprehend. As it happens, the Age called "modern" is not only a quite intractable given, but a given which is itself, according to Pevsner, a hard, mechanistic mass civilization resulting from the full development of the Industrial Revolution.As incontrovertible as Pevsner feels that hard civilizational structure to be, man can, nevertheless, ameliorate the rawness of that situation. The job of the artist is to discover the style of the age. The will of even this hard, uncompromising time must be given its form.Giving this structure to the artistic problem, Pevsner also sets his historiographic problem. In the march of the ages we arrive at the modern age with its harsh and intractable Zeitwollen. In the face of this terrible situation and in fulfillment of it, man must achieve the style for the Age. The task is imperative; due to its difficulty we must allow some artistic fantasyexplorations that may contribute to the search for style. Nevertheless, these permitted phantasms of art and the individual must finally submit to the imperatives of the Age.Pevsner sees such a drama being played out in the decades before the First World War. On the eve of the war, at the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914, the famous confrontation of Henry van de Velde and Hermann Muthesius provided a culminating and quintessential display of the struggle between man and his destiny. According to Pevsner, van de Velde represented the ambitions of the transitionally important but now fading Art Nouveau: fantasy, individualism, enthusiasm, exploration. Muthesius, on the other hand, opened the door to the future: the embrace of standardization which alone could meet the demands and provide the style of modern industry and mass
