Hermann Loeb

Hermann Wolfgang Loeb (born July 6, 1897 in Trier ; † April 30, 1963 ) was a German - Swiss art historian and publisher . In 1924 he was the founder of Prestel Verlag .

Life

Hermann Loeb grew up as the son of a wine merchant in Trier. There he attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, where he graduated from high school in 1914. After the First World War began in 1915 his studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn with mathematics and jurisprudence , then went to the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg to Heinrich Rickert for Philosophy and Carl Neumann for art history and on to Munich at the Ludwig -Maximilians University , where he became a student of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and the philosopher Moritz Geiger . In 1923 Loeb received his doctorate from the University of Cologne under Max Scheler with the dissertation Forms of the consideration of history and their application to art history , a contribution to the clarification of historical and art-historical types of abstraction .

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During his studies in Bonn, Loeb made friends with the bookseller and publisher Friedrich Cohen and has been closely connected to the book trade ever since. When the art dealer FAC Prestel, founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1774, was looking for a publisher for the portfolios of the Prestel Society, Loeb founded the Prestel Verlag in 1924 and there continued the tradition of the former Marées Society, in large portfolios of drawings by old masters in faithful reproductions of the To make science and the lovers accessible.

After the National Socialists seized power , who expelled him from the Reichsschrifttumskammer , Loeb transferred Prestel-Verlag to his long-time employee, Hans König, and in 1935 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he founded the Holbein-Verlag in Basel with the help of the art collector Tobias Christ and in collaboration with Prestel founded. There he was able to continue the series of scientific facsimile editions of old master drawings begun at Prestel as "Holbein books". The series of standard scientific works that Loeb had started at Prestel with the three-volume Tietze catalog of all of Albrecht Dürer's works was continued by Holbein-Verlag with a three-volume work on Hans Holbein the Younger by Heinrich Alfred Schmid, and a two-volume Leonardo work by Ludwig Heydenreich and the art history series “Ars Docta”, in which a volume on the anatomical work of Leonardo da Vinci was most recently published. The series “Swiss Painting” covers six volumes from the 15th to the 19th century. Jan Tschichold has not only published his “ History of Writing in Pictures” at Loeb , but also four volumes “Chinese Color Prints”. Over 100 titles have been published by Holbein-Verlag in the 21 years of its existence, many of them in French and English parallel editions, including portfolios with collotype reproductions of works by Paul Klee , Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall .

In 1955, Hermann Loeb founded Phoebus-Verlag in Basel, in which, among other things, Kurt Martin published the Karlsruhe “Sketchbook of Hans Baldung Grien ” in two volumes in 1959 and the “Writings from 22 years of museum activity” by Georg Schmidt , the long-time director of the Basel Art Museum published.

For his “Holbein books”, Loeb often spent days in the Basel university library or in the copperplate engraving room to study the source material. Negotiations about foreign-language editions of his books repeatedly took him to Paris , London and New York . After the Second World War he was one of the first to campaign for book traffic between Germany and Switzerland to get going again. Loeb taught publishing courses at the Basel bookseller school for many years. Copyright and publishing law as well as publishing calculations and fixed book prices were his specialties, on which he also published various articles in the Swiss book trade , the monthly publication of the Swiss Association of Booksellers and Publishers .

Hermann Loeb was married to Anna Maria Cetto and later to Irmgard Müller.

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1. ↑ ^{a b} StABS, PD-REG 3a 21798 Loeb, Hermann Wolfgang, Dr. phil. (1936) ( Memento of the original from March 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Personal dossier of the Aliens Police, Basel-Stadt State Archives , accessed on March 30, 2016. 
2. ↑ Meinolf Wewel : Hermann Loeb 60 years. In: Börsenblatt for the German book trade . Frankfurt edition, No. 72, September 6, 1957.