Béla Horovitz was born into a Jewish family in Budapest in Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) in 1898, growing up in Vienna and graduating as a Doctor of Law in 1922. In 1923 he founded the publishing company Phaidon Verlag, together with Ludwig Goldscheider and Fritz Ungar. Following the Anschluss in 1938, the Horovitz and Goldscheider families settled in Britain, with the reestablished Phaidon Press going on to become of the most respected art publishers in the country.
Publisher Béla Horovitz was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) in 1898. His father was in business and frequently travelled abroad, later moving the family to Vienna, Austria, where Horovitz received his secondary education and later went on to university. He was enrolled in the faculty of law but also studied philosophy, graduating as Doctor of Law in 1922. In 1923 he founded the publishing company Phaidon Verlag, together with Ludwig Goldscheider and Fritz Ungar, both of whom he had known at school in Vienna (Ungar left the company in 1926 to set up Saturn Verlag). Named after a pupil of Socrates and a speaker in Plato's dialogue on the immortality of the soul, Phaidon initially published bibliophile editions of literature with great attention to good design at affordable prices. This was followed by literary classics including the collected works of Plato and the plays of Shakespeare, as well as works of contemporary criticism, and in 1930 the firm began publishing classic history titles in large, well-illustrated and inexpensive editions. Historical biographies followed; among them the first three – Michelangelo, Velázquez and Raphael – in Phaidon's extensive series on great artists. In 1933 Phaidon published their first large-format monographs in several different language editions: Van Gogh (Vienna and London, 1936), the Impressionists (Vienna, 1937) and Botticelli (Vienna, 1937), establishing the firm's international reputation for high-quality reproductions. In her book Émigrés: The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain, Anna Nyburg describes the carefree context in which Phaidon operated in 1920s-1930s' Vienna: 'The Horovitzes lived on the Parkring ... The Phaidon offices were on the piano nobile, and the servants lived upstairs. The offices were impressive, with paintings by Klimt on the walls. After lunch ... Goldscheider and Horovitz would go to the Café Stadtpark to meet friends, smoke and spend time with their children: this was where new publications were planned' (Nyburg, p. 15).
After the assassination of the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by Nazi agents in 1934, both the Horovitz and Goldscheider families had the foresight to obtain passports for their whole families, and thus, were ready to flee following the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) in 1938, immigrating to Britain. They were assisted by British publisher Sir Stanley Unwin, through whose company, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., they had been distributing books both within continental Europe and Britain from the late 1920s onwards. Unwin also acted as a guarantor to both families, helping Horovitz and Goldscheider avoid alien internment following the outbreak of the Second World War. Phaidon Verlag, reestablished in England as Phaidon Press, moved first to Oxford, where it operated at number 14 St Giles during the war years (1940–45) and then to London, where aside from producing art books and anthologies the company focused on publishing philosophical literature and Judaica within the framework of the East and West Library, also publishing religious literature in Hebrew. In 1946 Horovitz acquired British citizenship.
By the end of 1949, Phaidon's cooperation with Unwin came to an end. In 1951, Phaidon made publishing history with its first Colour Plate book, pioneering the process by which artists' work became readily available in colour and disseminated to a wide audience at a low price. Phaidon's best-known title, The Story of Art, first published in 1950, had its origins in a chance meeting on the top deck of a London bus between Horovitz and Prof. Ernst H. Gombrich. A fellow refugee from Vienna, Gombrich was then a research fellow teaching at the Warburg Institute. Horovitz persuaded him to write his now celebrated one-volume survey of the history of art, encouraging him to persevere despite Gombrich's attempts to avoid him when Horovitz visited his parents in Oxford – 'so embarrassed he was by his own lack of progress' (Nyburg, p. 91). Also among the long list of illustrious art historians published by Phaidon are: Sir Kenneth Clark, Otto Benesch, Bernard Berenson, Anthony Blunt and Rudolf Wittkower. In 1955 Horovitz died suddenly from a heart attack while on business in New York, and for the next fifteen years his daughter, Elly, and her husband, Harvey Miller, continued the company's flourishing business, developing its reputation with a series of catalogue raisonnés on major artists and famous art collections. Horovitz's second daughter, Hannah (1936–2010), organised concerts for promising musicians (mainly foreigners) in London since the 1970s. His son, Joseph (b. 1926) is an accomplished conductor and composer.
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Publications related to [Béla Horovitz] in the Ben Uri Library