Gustav Ecke

Gustav Emil Wilhelm Ecke (13 June 1896 – 17 December 1971) was a German and later American historian of art best known for his book Chinese Domestic Furniture, first published in wartime China in 1944. The book presented the aesthetic of a neglected art form for scholars and connoisseurs and described the techniques of construction for cabinet-makers. It was the first book in any language on Chinese classic hardwood furniture.

Ecke was born in Bonn, Germany, a center of German Expressionism and Russian Constructivism and made lively by refugees from their home countries. His father, also Gustav Ecke (1855–1920) was a professor of theology at Bonn University. Ecke wrote his doctoral thesis on French Surrealism in 1922, and accepted an offer to be Professor of European Philosophy at University of Amoy in Fujian in 1923, then after five years moved to Tsinghua University in Beijing. In a brief return to Paris to conduct research, the prospects of fascism daunted him and he returned to China. He taught at Fujen University (Catholic University) and was a researcher at the National Institute of Architecture, both in Beijing. He was one of the founding editors of the scholarly journal Monumenta Serica. In 1945 he married the artist and scholar Beatrice Tseng Yuho. The couple left China for Hawai’i in 1949. He was curator of Asian Art at the Honolulu Academy of Arts until he died in 1971.

Soon after arriving in China in the early 1920s, Ecke turned his attention to China’s architectural history. Since there were few surviving wooden structures, he initially photographed and recorded stone buildings in Fujian, where he then taught. After moving to Beijing, he researched as many stone pagodas as he could find in nearby Hebei and Shandong before the outbreak of war in 1937. His book Twin Pagodas of Zayton, published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1935, and articles in Monumenta Serica, presented some but by no means all of his findings.

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