Evers, Hans Gerhard

Evers studied literature at the university in Göttingen, writing his thesis on Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He moved to Heidelberg where the lectures of Ludwig Curtius, the Egyptologist Hermann Ranke and the literary historian and member of the Stefan George circle, Friedrich Gundolf (1880-1931), converted his interest to art history. After his Die Breitrichtung der Basilika appeared in 1932, written under Wilhelm Pinder Evers was appointed a lecturer at the university in Munich. He became Professor at Munich in 1942. That year he published the first of his two books on Rubens--this written in the form of a historical novel--yet nevertheless accounting for Rubens as both artist and statesman. After World War II he accepted a teaching position in 1950 at the Technischen Hochschule in Darmstadt where he remained until his retirement in 1968. He was one of the motivating figures behind the 1950 Darmstädter Gespräch. In Vom Historismus zum Funktionalismus (1967) he offered a revisionist account of nineteenth-century historicist architecture. His interest in art historiography was instrumental in his co-editing the bibliography volume in the Bibliographie zur Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts,1968. He was selected to write the volume in the Art of the World series by Crown [Die Kulturen des Abendlandes in Germany] on modern art, Art of the Modern Age (1970). In his final years, Evers attempted to counter the legend that Ludwig II of Bavaria was a mad king. He cast the famous Ludwig der Verrückt as the last enlightened monarch who was able to imprint his stylistic vision on his architectural commissions. His students included Otto von Simson, who, though he officially wrote his dissertation under Pinder, saw Evers as his most influential teacher, and Josef Adolf Schmoll genannt Eisenwerth, who wrote his habilitation under Evers.