Professor Peter Erik Lasko (1924-2003)
Michael Rhodes
Keeper, British Museum 1950-65; Professor of Visual Arts, University
of East Anglia 1965-73; Professor of the History of Art, Courtauld
Institute, London University 1974-85, Director 1974-85; married 1948
Lyn Norman (three daughters); died 18 May 2003.
Peter Lasko made a huge contribution to the study of the visual arts.
His work ranged from museum curatorship through research and writing
to teaching and academic leadership. Although principally renowned for
his knowledge of medieval art, he completed a book on German
Expressionism and Modernism shortly before his death.
Peter Lasko's father worked in the film industry, and Peter told the
story of setting off for school one morning and meeting his mother and
father returning from an all-night party. This was Berlin in the early
1930s, and much that Peter Lasko went on to achieve has to be seen in
the context of his childhood there, and then briefly in Paris, during
a vital period in the development of 20th-century visual culture.
That he ultimately made a career in art history, and in England, was
due to a chain of accidents which are equally significant of the
period. A friend of the family was a senior officer in the SS. He
advised Peter's father, Leo, who was Jewish, to leave Germany. Peter
and his mother, Wally, and ultimately his sister, subsequently joined
him and so it was in London that Peter Lasko finished his education.
His first ambition was to become a painter, and he trained at
Hammersmith and St Martin's Schools of Art. A contemporary was Eduardo
Paolozzi, who remained a good friend.
But by the end of the Second World War, Lasko was beginning to realise
that he did not have the talent to succeed as an artist and enrolled
at Birkbeck College, under the tutelage of Nikolaus Pevsner, to study
art history. Despite some shortcomings in his academic background (he
had no Latin), Lasko was admitted to the Courtauld Institute in 1946
and graduated three years later.
For the next 15 years, Lasko worked in the Department of British and
Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum. At the time, the focus of
much of the department's scholarly activity, under the guidance of
Rupert Bruce Mitford, was publishing the Sutton Hoo ship burial. Lasko
was only tangentially involved, but the stress on the study of early
medieval Europe in the period of Germanic migrations became
fundamental to his thinking, as is apparent in his later book The
Kingdom of the Franks (1971).
In that work, as in almost all his other writings, the interplay of
European cultures with the styles and techniques of artistic
production were pivotal. Rather than being a pure formalist, Lasko
preferred to analyse the course of art history as the coincidence of
skilled craftsmanship and the patronage that nurtured it.
His particular interest in the technology of medieval metalwork led to
his being commissioned, by Pevsner, as general editor of the series,
to write the volume in the Pelican History of Art on Ars Sacra
800-1200 (1972), which is his greatest contribution to scholarship.
In it he synthesised the hitherto disparate and partisan local and
national histories of goldsmithing, metal casting and ivory carving
into a plausible narrative. In the process he effectively created a
subject, helping to establish the centrality of the so-called minor
arts in the formation of medieval visual sensibility. Germany and the
Low Countries took centre stage in the story, but the plot was
international in its outlook and ramifications.
In 1965, while Ars Sacra was still in the making, Lasko was offered an
opportunity which was to take his career in another, influential
direction. He was appointed as the first professor of visual arts at
the newly established University of East Anglia in Norwich. In the
course of five years he created a department of remarkably talented
young art historians, helped to establish a collection of 20th-century
abstract and constructivist art and design, and contributed to
securing for East Anglia the bequest of the Sainsbury Collection.
However, by the time the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts opened in
1978, Lasko had moved on, succeeding Anthony Blunt as Director of the
Courtauld Institute.
His major contribution there was to engineer the move of the Institute
from Home House in Portman Square to Somerset House in the Strand.
This was not achieved without opposition, but it allowed the Institute
to be united with a number of outstanding art collections. His
determination to bring the art historians under the same roof as the
objects they studied, in the words of one the former sceptics, "turned
out to be a very good idea". Visitors to the astonishing treasures now
on show at Somerset House need to know how much their experience is
the result of Lasko's vision.
Lasko's energy and scholarship gained recognition in a number of ways.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, served as a Trustee of
the British Museum and as a Commissioner for Historic Monuments. But
it was only after his retirement as director from the Courtauld that
he was again able to devote concerted effort to research. In
particular, he had a long-standing interest in the early history of
German Expressionism, and his book on the subject is about to be
published by Manchester University Press (The Expressionist Roots of
Modernism). The project which he took up thereafter was rather
different: a novel based on the life of the 12th-century monastic
goldsmith Roger of Helmarshausen.
For those who knew him personally, Peter Lasko's many other
enthusiasms will loom as large as his writing and service on
committees. His support for Norwich City Football Club was enduring.
His political commitment resulted in his standing as a Labour
Councillor for Wroxham, in Norfolk (where folk memory suggests his
vote may have reached double figures). He was close to fanatical about
home improvements and holidays, frequently caravan holidays in the
years when his family was growing up. Whatever the cause or the event,
Peter's commitment was total. His ebullience could elicit both
positive and negative responses, but those who appreciated it
invariably left his company with an enhanced awareness of their own
vitality.
T. A. Heslop, Independent, May 28, 2003