Full Name: Evers, Hans Gerhard
Other Names:
- Hans Gerhard Evers
Gender: male
Date Born: 1900
Date Died: 1993
Place Born: Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Place Died: Hofgeismar, Hesse, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Overview
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.
Selected Bibliography
Schriften. Darmstadt : Techn. Hochschule, 1975; and Lietzmann, Hilda, and Lankheit, Klaus and Novotny, Fritz. Bibliographie zur Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Publikationen der Jahre, 1940-1966. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1968; and Rathke Ewald, and Herzog, Erich, and Gertz, Ulrich. Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts in Hessen. 3 vols. Hanau, Hessen: Peters, 1965-1969; Die Engelsbrücke in Rom. Berlin: Mann, 1948; Zeugnisse der Angst in der modernen Kunst. Darmstadt: Darmstädter Gespräch, Mathildenhöhe1963; Vom Historismus zum Funktionalismus. Zürich: Schweizer Verlagshaus, Neue Schweizer Bibliothek, 1967; Vom Historismus zum Funktionalismus. Baden-Baden: Holle, 1967, English, The Art of the Modern Age. New York: Crown Publishers, 1970; Dürer bei Memling. Munich: Fink, 1972; Ludwig II. von Bayern: Theaterfürst, König, Bauherr: Gedanken zum Selbstverständnis. Munich: Hirmer, 1986; Peter Paul Rubens. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1942; Rubens und sein Werk: neue Forschungen. Brüssels: De Lage Landen, 1943; Tod, Macht und Raum als Bereiche der Architektur. Munich: Neuer Filser-verlag; inhaber: dr. Benno Filser, 1939.
Sources
Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 84-86; Stonard, John-Paul. Art and National Reconstruction in Germany 1945-55. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 2004, pp. 233-234; [transcript] “Otto von Simson, interviewed by Richard Cándida Smith.” Art History Oral Documentation Project. Malibu, CA: Getty Research Institute,p. 9.
Archives
- Archief van Hans Gerhard Evers, Rubenianum. https://anet.be/isadtree/rub/opacrubisad/isad:rub:3130, BE-ANN14/010EVERS.
Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen