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.

[1] 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.