Thomas Leon Heck

Thomas Leon Heck (* 1957 in Ludwigsburg ) is a German antiquarian , art history journalist and publisher ( Noûs-Verlag ). He also works as an auctioneer , art dealer , estate collector and art appraiser.

life and work

In 1975, at the age of 18, Heck was admitted as the youngest auctioneer in Germany. In 1976 he began studying Protestant theology and classical philology at the University of Tübingen . He continued this until 1985, but did not take a full exam. In 1986 he was appointed chairman of the Baden-Württemberg Auctioneers' Association.

Heck wrote reviews and scientific articles for the Allgemeine Künstlerlexikon, the magazine of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History , the magazine Weltkunst , the Reutlinger General-Anzeiger as well as state institutions and museums. As an art expert and appraiser for the Treuhandanstalt , he carried out the evaluation of the “Leipzig auction house”, which was directly subordinate to the top foreign exchange procurer of the GDR , Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski .

In 1990, Heck became known to a broader public that he received items from the estate of the former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger for sale, which he bought from high-ranking personalities such as Pope Paul VI. , Emperor Hirohito of Japan, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi , President Charles de Gaulle and others.

In 1992, Heck founded the Weltkunst-Abbildungs-Index , which appears in his Noûs publishing house as a book and as a database and lists over 100,000 paintings, graphics and sculptures that were reproduced in the magazine Weltkunst . Further image databases of this kind for other art magazines and catalog series followed. Heck wrote writings and lectures on philological topics, such as translations of Latin and ancient Greek texts, the correct pronunciation of Latin, or Latin legal rules.

Since 1997 he has worked on the world's largest artists 'lexicon, the General Artists' Lexicon. In 1999 he wrote the register of artist names for the Great German Art Exhibition in the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Thomas Leon Heck was voted Auctioneer of the Year 2009 by the Association of German Auctioneers . He lives in Dusslingen , where he runs an antiquarian bookshop .

Fonts

• The principle of egoism. 1994.
• * & I (= symbols for "Asterisk and Obelisk"). Autobiography. 2001.
• The auction in literature. 2005.

Web links

• Literature by and about Thomas Leon Heck in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage