Walter Neurath was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1903. Educated in Vienna and having worked for his family business and in publishing during the 1920s, Neurath was forced to flee to Britain in 1938 fearing Nazi persecution. In 1949 he co-founded, with his wife, Eva, the visual arts publishing house Thames & Hudson.
Publisher Walter Neurath was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on 1st October 1903, the only child of Alois and Gisela Neurath, Czechoslovak immigrants from Bratislava. Neurath was educated in Vienna at the Volksschule and the Realgymnasium and matriculated with distinction before going on to study Art History, Archaeology and History at the University of Vienna. In 1922, he became a member of the Institute for Art History, and subsequently, lectured on this subject. At the same time, he worked for the art book publisher Würthle & Sohn, and also organised art exhibitions, including one in Paris of nineteenth French paintings from Viennese collections. He was also a founder member, in the 1920s, of Neustift (New Foundations), a small group of left-wing intellectuals with a radical approach to life and culture which included the future world-famous psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, whose seminal work on the German concentration camps, The Informed Heart, Neurath was to publish with great success in 1960. In 1925 he married Lilly Kruk and, owing to his father's ill-health, took over the running of the family firm (wholesale importers of tea, coffee and luxury foods). Following his father's recovery in 1929, Neurath became a full-time publisher, exhibiting a strong interest in printing and typography. He joined the Verlag für Kulturforschung (Publishing House for Cultural Research) and Verlag Zinner, who published fiction, where, six months later, he became Production Director. As a Jewish firm, Verlag Zinner was subject to the Nazi regime's introduction of anti-Semitic legislation, which effectively made the main German language market inaccessible, and they were forced to close. From 1935–37 Neurath worked as an educational publisher, developing new illustration techniques, and in 1937 was appointed manager of the Wilhelm Frick publishing house, where he commissioned and published illustrated books on the arts, as well as anti-Nazi propaganda.
Following the Anschluss (Nazi occupation of Austria) in 1938, he was ordered to cease activities and, wanted by the Gestapo, fled to Britain with his second wife, Marianne on 1 June 1938, sponsored by Frances Margesson, wife of Captain (later Viscount) Margesson, with whom the Neuraths stayed at Boddington, near Rugby for five years. After being offered work by a fellow Jewish-Viennese émigré, Wolfgang Foges, Neurath soon became Production Manager at Adprint, a London based book packager and colour printing specialist founded in 1937, where he designed and produced the celebrated King Penguin series, followed by the larger and more ambitious Britain in Pictures series edited by W. J. Turner. In 1940, as part of the round up of so-called 'enemy aliens', Neurath was interned on the Isle of Man. After release, he returned to Adprint, where he also found a job for Eva Feuchtwang, the wife of Wilhelm Feuchtwang whom he had met during internment. United in their love for well produced books and their passion for art, Neurath and Feuchtwang co-founded in 1949 the visual arts publishing firm of Thames & Hudson, named after the rivers of London and New York. Thames & Hudson undertook international co-publishing ventures in order to make their books available for a reasonable cost in several countries. English Cathedrals, with photographs by Martin Hürlimann, was the first and most successful, of the ten titles published in their first list in 1950 - a testament to the company’s strong belief in the longevity of books, it remained in print until 1971; Albert Einstein’s Out of My Later Years, which was also published in their first year, was an early indication of the intended breadth of their publishing schedule.
Neurath and Feuchtwang, who married in 1950, were adept at finding promising titles that other publishers had turned down. In 1958, Neurath launched what is still one of Thames & Hudson's best-known series, the World of Art, characterised by the pocket-sized format and black spines, these titles became the backbone of its highly varied list, expanded in just seven years to include some 49 titles. Neurath was often the first to recognise the talents of emerging artists, publishing the first books on painters such as Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Jackson Pollock, and many more. He also owned an enviable collection of works by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, the latter a lifelong friend. Much of Neurath's business was social, and the couple's circle included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Having built one of the most important publishing houses in Europe in less than two decades, Walter Neurath died in London in 1967, at the age of 63 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Henry Moore wrote that ‘his death [was] a loss to our cultural life’ while Sir Herbert Read observed that Neurath ‘more than any other single individual [was] responsible for the revolution in the publishing of art books’ and was ‘one of those rare entrepreneurs who successfully combine business acumen with idealism’ (Thames & Hudson website). After his death Neurath's son Thomas and daughter Constance took up the reins as Managing Director and Head of Design respectively and Thames & Hudson endowed an annual Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture held first at Birkbeck College, University of London and subsequently at the National Gallery. The lecture is always published as an illustrated book and for the first 30 years at least was delivered by scholars who had been published personally by Neurath.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Walter Neurath]
Publications related to [Walter Neurath] in the Ben Uri Library