Thomas Neurath obituary

The Guardian

a day ago

In 1967, when still in his 20s, Thomas Neurath became managing director of Thames & Hudson, the illustrated book publishers founded by his father and stepmother in 1949. He led the firm for half a century, continuing his parents' aim of bringing authoritative scholarship on the world of art and culture to a wide readership.
Neurath, who has died aged 84 of cancer, developed the bedrock World of Art series, which had launched in 1958, to encompass some 300 titles covering the history of art; more than a million copies of the books have now been sold.
'I can't remember ever wanting to be a publisher,' Neurath said in a 2011 interview with Livres Hebdo, the weekly bible of the French book trade. 'And then one day I was.' It would have been a difficult fate to avoid. As the photography historian Philippe Garner, said, Neurath 'carried European history in his DNA'.
His father's stepfather, Arthur Stemmer, a noted collector of Egon Schiele, had fled Vienna for London after the Anschluss; Thomas's parents, Walter, a publisher and gallery owner, and Marianne (nee Müller), a schoolteacher, had also escaped to England from Austria in 1938. Thames & Hudson became part of that injection of continental culture into postwar Britain that would include everyone from Ernst Gombrich to Oskar Kokoschka.
Thomas joined the family business as an editor in 1961, his life changing completely when his father died six years later. He became responsible for the day to day running of Thames & Hudson – his sister, Constance, took over design – and he would remain the company's managing director until 2005, and chairman until 2021.
It was a daunting inheritance. In Vienna, Walter had, among much else, taught at the equivalent of the Workers' Educational Association, and Thames & Hudson was shaped by the Fabian ideal of providing high quality books at affordable prices, particularly to students. Thomas felt duty bound to continue 'the heritage and socialist ideals of my parents'.
At the same time, he had no intention of allowing the company to go bust by preserving it in aspic. 'In my father's view, only painting, architecture and sculpture counted as art in their own right,' Neurath said. 'He thought of photography as lacking in seriousness and fashion as frivolous.' Both of these were now added to the T&H lists, while definitions of the fine arts were broadened and modernised.
In 1984, the company became the first to publish a book on graffiti, in the form of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant's Subway Art. Others followed on such non-Eurocentric subjects as Buddhist and Aboriginal Australian art. Neurath, a child of the 60s, also introduced titles on what he called 'archetypal psychology', including John Michell's deeply kooky 1969 book View Over Atlantis.
All these appeared alongside the heavyweight works of scholarship his father had favoured, together with exhibition catalogues for galleries and museums around the world.
If Neurath broadened the company's cultural reach, he also set about globalising its business. Like many refugees from Nazism, the Neuraths had been eager to assimilate. One of the books on Thames & Hudson's first list in 1950 was Geoffrey Grigson's English Cathedrals. Before studying at Cambridge, Thomas had been sent to Charterhouse, a leading public school. But for all his parents' efforts, he never seemed entirely English.
Royalty puzzled him: when T&H produced a book on the photographs of Cecil Beaton, Neurath was heard to moan, 'But who is the Duchess of Gloucester?' He was prone, without thinking, to assume that all his editors could read German.
As well as building on the World of Art, with titles now translated into 16 languages, he opened T&H offshoots abroad. The company's original two-river name had anticipated operations in London and New York, both of them English-speaking cities. In 1989, Neurath set up Éditions Thames & Hudson in Paris, the World of Art series becoming L'Univers de l'Art. 'I loved being there,' he said. 'It had always been a dream of mine to have an office in Paris.'
For all his insistence on guarding his parents' socialist principles, Neurath was a skilful businessman. The suggestion that Thames & Hudson might be in some way a philanthropic concern made him bristle. His genius for forming allegiances with foreign publishing houses helped the company flourish at a time when other publishers were going to the wall.
Neurath was born in Brackley, Northamptonshire, after his parents found wartime refuge in Britain. His father worked for a publishing company called Adprint and, following Marianne's death in 1950 aged 40, married Eva Feuchtwang (nee Itzig), a colleague and fellow refugee with whom he set up Thames & Hudson.
After leaving school, and a short spell with a publisher in Israel, which he hated, Thomas was sent to Paris, to work as an intern at the French house Éditions Arthaud. Moving into the so-called Beat Hotel in rue Gît-le-Cœur – a fleapit whose residents included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs – the 18-year-old found himself caught up in the glory days of the Left Bank. Photographs of the time show him beaming widely and, invariably, smoking. From there, he left to read archaeology and anthropology at St John's College, Cambridge – he hated this, too, and dropped out – joining Thames & Hudson in 1961.
The firm remained, above all, a family affair. Neurath's two daughters followed him into the business, becoming T&H directors. More broadly, employees were treated as though they were family, occasionally alarmingly so. Neurath's fits of temper were famous: Thames & Hudson mythology includes the story of him throwing a shoe at a startled archaeology editor. But loyalty was bred on both sides. The company's employees tended to stay, sometimes for their entire careers.
Beneath his chain-smoking bearishness, Neurath was a shy man. Unlike his stepmother, Eva, who was driven to the office every day in a chauffeured Bentley, he shunned public life, preferring the company of his children and grandchildren in his book-filled north London house. This, too, retained a faint air of prewar Vienna. 'I grew up in a house where we talked a lot about culture and literature,' Neurath said.
He is survived by his wife, Gun Thor, a jewellery designer, whom he married in 1962, their daughters Johanna and Susanna, and his sister, Constance.
Thomas Neurath, publisher, born 7 October 1940; died 13 June 2025