Max Loehr was born in
Chemnitz, Saxony, Germany, in 1903. He entered the
University of Munich in 1931, where he studied Far Eastern art and obtained his PhD in 1936. Then he worked at the
Museum Five Continents in Munich on the Asian collections. In 1940, Loehr went to Beijing to study at the
Sino-German Center for Research Promotion, later striving as director of the institute and as assistant professor at
Tsinghua University. In 1949, he returned to his former post in Munich, and two years after that he moved to the United States to become a professor at the
University of Michigan. In 1960, Loehr accepted the
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chair position in East Asian Art at
Harvard University, and took a post as curator of
Oriental art at the
Fogg Museum until his retirement in 1974. Loehr died in 1988 in
Nashua, New Hampshire.{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/21/obituaries/max-loehr-84-a-leading-scholar-in-oriental-art.html?pagewanted=1|title=Max Loehr, 84, a Leading Scholar in Oriental Art ==Selected works==