“This scheme,” George Kates wrote in 1933 to his friend and mentor, Harvard professor Paul J. Sachs, “had started as an experiment to begin the mastery of Chinese without a teacher. This led on so fast and so interestingly from point to point that almost before I was aware of it, I felt an imperative need to supplement my work on the written language with study in Peking itself. And now, here I am, ready to land in China tomorrow.”
“Your letter . . . has just come into my hands,” writes an astonished Sachs, who taught a famous course in connoisseurship and mentored a generation of curators and museum directors. “That I am surprised by the contents is putting it mildly. I shall be much interested to hear from you now and again so that I may know how you are progressing, because as far as I can see, it will of course take you years to lay the foundation on which you propose to build a structure.”
Few followed a more circuitous path to the Middle Kingdom than George Kates, scholar, connoisseur, collector, lecturer, and briefly curator at the Brooklyn Museum. He might have been invented by Noël Coward. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1895, he prepped at Horace Mann School in New York but took time out to board a sailing vessel to Australia. Enlisting in the army during World War I, he had a “good war,” serving as a translator at General Headquarters in Chaumont (France) and Germany. (He acquired his fluency in several European languages during a childhood spent in Europe and in Latin America with his parents—a Polish industrialist father and a mother of German ancestry—an English governess, and a succession of fräuleins and mademoiselles,
No career better confirms the breadth and depth of the American addiction to Chinese art and culture. No American loved China with greater fidelity, and in his later years he was a leading enthusiast of and author of a book on Ming furniture—the sleek, unadorned, essentialist chairs, tables, sideboards, and beds fashioned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that were seen to blend felicitously into modernist living rooms.
Young Kates attended Columbia as an undergraduate architectural student, transferring in his junior year to Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude (Class of 1922). Then began what Kates described as his academic “sandwich years,” spent alternating between Harvard as a tutor in history and literature and Queen’s College, Oxford, as a doctoral candidate. Kates had been talent-spotted by Sachs, who bolstered his pupil’s diminishing family fortunes with a series of successful recommendations for fellowships, the first of which was a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship to study European Renaissance art in England. Introductions to dealers, collectors, and owners of French châteaux like the Sommiers, chatelains of the seventeenth-century Vaux-le-Vicomte followed, as well as an invitation to accompany “P.J.” in his great touring car through France: Beauvais, Amiens, Le Tourquet, and finally a Channel crossing. “I am to breakfast with Professor Sachs here at his hotel this morning. . . . Sachs and I went to the dealers yesterday where the quality of things was wonderful. In the evening we went to a gay show at the ‘Ambassadeurs.’” So, as he would announce to a friend, the Cleveland curator Henry Sayles Francis, he was launched—“me voila bien lancé.”
In the space of a few years, he had vaulted from being a social nobody to being a member of an international set composed of Bright Young Things. His ascent is the more striking since, unlike many of his friends (among them John Nicholas Brown, scion of the Rhode Island family that endowed the eponymous university), Kates was kept on a short leash by his father, who felt entitled to spend what he had earned, leaving George and his sister Beatrice without incomes.
He was rescued from penury by a fortuitous meeting on the steps of the Fogg Museum. The president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, introduced him to Adolph Zukor, the Hungarian mogul who headed Paramount Pictures. This chance encounter would determine the next five years of Kates’s life. Initially, our young scholar arrived in Los Angeles in September 1927, “with a fortune of only 52 cents and a position as a deputy to producer Walter Wanger.” And so, as Kates noted, the pendulum swung from punting on Oxford’s Isis River to swimming in Santa Monica’s backyard pools.
Dartmouth-educated Walter Wanger was socially a notch above the Jewish moguls running the Hollywood studios. Credited with making Rudolph Valentino a star with The Sheik, Wanger had a penchant for producing films with a foreign accent, making stars during Kates’s tenure of Pola Negri, Olga Baclanova, and Maurice Chevalier. Hence with time off to complete his Oxford doctoral dissertation (The Passing of the Middle Ages and the Advent of the Renaissance in French Art) and gain his degree, Kates spent the next five years delightfully practicing what he termed “applied archaeology.” He became a set advisor, suggesting appropriate French quincaillerie (hardware) for the doors on Pola’s latest film with a European setting, answering questions like “What does an attendant at a French Waxwork Museum look like? How are exhibits labeled? What signs are used outside a good Parisian jeweler’s? Does a French gardener wear any specially distinctive clothes?” He burrowed into the studio’s research library and toured city streets, private gardens, and the countryside looking for appropriate settings for scenes.
He became the last word on European manners. While a picture was being shot, he remained on the set “so as to keep gestures in character” and possessed veto power when things were done incorrectly—for example, “Florence Vidor is learning to cross herself the Catholic rather than the Greek Orthodox way so as not to puzzle the public.” Kates was much taken with Hollywood royalty, particularly by the “ravishing dark beauty” Natasha Galitzine, working as an “extra,” who was married to a Romanov nephew of Tsar Nicholas II, and by Paramount’s Polish star, Pola Negri, who had recently married a Georgian prince, Serge Mdivani: “Pola holds court like a queen, and has eyes into which one can very easily fall. I was presented, the first morning with a ceremony as meticulous as any I have ever gone through, and she has been very gracious. Four maids wait upon her, or three and a secretary.”
The studio royals likewise succumbed to the charms of Kates. His Oxford connection conferred prestige in Hollywood, while Oxford envied the money, the climate, and the glamour of California. Eventually he became director of Paramount’s Foreign Department during the years when Hollywood was switching from silent movies to “talkies.” His new job entailed shuttling between the new sound stages in Joinville (France), Hollywood, and Long Island, where he was in charge of “plucking various absurdities” for Paramount’s foreign market. But it all ended with the Great Depression. In 1931, Paramount closed its Long Island studios, and finding himself without a job but with some savings, Kates moved to Saunderstown, Rhode Island, where he bought a mid-eighteenth-century yellow clapboard house not far from an old snuff mill.
And it was here, inspired by Arthur Waley’s translations of classic Chinese poetry and Pearl Buck’s best-selling novels, that Kates settled down to teach himself Chinese—with the “task of making myself a Sinologue.” Which is how, the following year, after seeking the advice of Langdon Warner, he found himself sailing from Victoria on the Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Asia. Once in Peking and enrolled in the College of Chinese Studies, “the Oyster,” as he was dubbed by the foreigners whose company he avoided, eventually settled down, with two polite but eccentric servants, in a rented courtyard home of a former palace eunuch, a few minutes’ walk from the Forbidden City and the imperial lakes.
“What a pleasure to have one’s own steep-roofed, peaked, red gate, a generous courtyard with an acacia in it, square and with plenty of room for flowers in the summer.” It was sparse, Kates elaborates: “No electric light, no wooden floors (brick covered with matting sufficed), no heating apparatus except several cast-iron stoves, and no plumbing did I ever install . . . and so my house, while extremely comfortable, remained more authentically Chinese than any that I can recall belonging to Western friends.”
Soon he began collecting: “Proud palaces were being dismantled or demolished. Every petty merchant, too, practiced the fine art of conjuring up new desires, which his eloquence sought to turn to urgent needs in just such heads as mine. Yet for the objects of daily use that I wished to buy, if one were known not to be rich and also spoke the language readily, one need never have the uneasy fear of being cheated, or the disgust of finding that imitation had been foisted upon one. Further, I bargained for nothing ruthlessly taken from its setting, nor shorn of its roots. My unpretentious good furniture, the simple pewter or porcelain dishes for my table, were bought unhurriedly as they caught my fancy.”
Kates was critical not only of the lifestyle of Peking’s expats but also of their taste, the “dull and expensive, porcelains” and “garish Mandarin robes which they condemned to the oddest uses.” Yet the very seriousness of his endeavors frequently exposed “the Oyster” to the mockery of the foreign community. His friend and fellow Peking resident Harold Acton, who had embellished the house he had inherited from G. E. Morrison, The Times correspondent, with a swimming pool and a carpet of lawn, satirized him as Phillip Flower, disguising Kates as an Englishman from Croyden in his novel Peonies and Ponies (1941):
His [Flower’s] Chinese friendships had been a failure. He had been too assiduous, perhaps, in his cultivation of any Chinese that had come his way. . . . Drudging at the Chinese Classics, sometimes past midnight with a wet towel about his forehead, always he hoped for new light on the elusive spirit of the Chinese people and new guidance for the direction of his life in the land of his chosen exile. He wanted to meet the Chinese on their own ground and be accepted as one of them. He would have liked nothing better than to be adopted by a Chinese family, and in his reveries he fancied himself performing the Confucian rites, setting forth on Ch’ing Ming, or the Festival of Pure Brightness, to sweep the ancestral graves—forgetting that his nearest, if not dearest of kin, were mostly sepulchered in distant Croyden.
Not everyone was as dismissive. John Ferguson, the doyen of foreign Sinologists, commenting to Langdon Warner on the Harvard-Yenching fellows of 1934, an intake that included the distinguished China historians John Fairbank and Derk Bodde as well as Laurence Sickman, described Kates as the best of the lot, “a man of unusual talents” and “wide experience,” adding, “I think of his entrance into the field of Chinese art as I did when I first knew of the interest that Bernard Berenson had begun to take a quarter of a century ago in the same subject. I wished at that time that a man with Berenson’s background could come to China, undertake to learn the language and make himself proficient in the necessary rudiments of Chinese art. Dr. Kates should have every possible encouragement.”
Gossip pertaining to the state visits of Harvard notables is a regular feature of Kates’s voluminous correspondence. One visiting celebrity was the writer John P. Marquand (Class of 1915), critic and chronicler of the Boston Brahmins, who drew on this trip for his novel Ming Yellow. Marquand was along on the 1934 expedition to the Wutai Shan in Shanxi Province, one of China’s four holiest mountains, whose five terraced peaks were each topped by a Buddhist temple. Warner had warned Larry Sickman that Alan Priest was “on his way to Peking with an amazing collection of society traveling companions.” Among them was the landscape architect Fletcher Steele, “a person of great intelligence and discrimination,” along with three ladies—Mrs. Edward Robinson, the widow of the former director of the Met; Mrs. Murphy, “an intelligent up to date society dame famous for her crazes on art and music etc.”; and the wealthy Bar Harbor and Boston spinster Mary Wheelwright, “who is the patron of all the American Indian arts and has set the pottery and dying [sic] and weaving industries of our Southwest back on their feet.” Priest viewed this as a collecting trip for the Met—he was searching for the missing “halo” for the great Wei Buddha, acquired by Bosch Reitz—that could be conveniently subsidized by his wealthy charges. Alternately, the elderly widows could perhaps be persuaded to bequeath their collections to the Met. Alan invited George, whose Chinese by this time was excellent, as interpreter. Trailing an entourage of servants and baggage porters, it seemed “a half-mile train when they were on the road.” The “circus,” as it was called by its ringmaster, “became extremely temperamental in its latter stages,” according to Kates. “Many wills, much confinement” added to the stress of being for three weeks in barren country away from the railhead at Taiyuan, the provincial capital, although they traveled in the “greatest of luxury,” fortified by “large glasses of morning orange juice” and raisins brought along by Mary Wheelwright in “a green Harvard book bag.”
The expedition proved a quasi-comic folly. As Kates recalled thirty-six years later in an interview with Marquand’s biographer, Millicent Bell, the party split into two camps: the Rakes and the Frumps, or the saucy thinkers and drinkers and the disapproving stuffed shirts and blouses. Kates disliked all the foreign “society”; he hated their bickering and found them ignorant and arrogant. But he liked Marquand, and he remembered several good moments, notably the day the two of them broke away and climbed one of the peaks alone. At the top, they were met by a priest from the temple, who brought them a picnic lunch staggering under the weight of heavy silver plates. Finally, back in Peking, the two factions tried to reconcile at a grand dinner in a hired palace. It was an absolute fiasco, Kates told Bell, “and ended with smashed glasses and an overturned table.”
The trip had been preceded by one to a nearby monastery, again led by Priest with George as his deputy. It included Mrs. Robinson:
Such regal goings-on-you never did see! Mrs. Edward Robinson went in state. Chairs, bearers, lanterns, runners, even a spring bed carried up the mountain for the lady to sleep on when she got to the top. It was a pageant; especially when the “duchess of Manchester” (for so she was called here) was given Prince Kung’s imperial (and rather precariously old chair)—to be carried down the mountain again.
George Kates (left) with Prince Puru in Prince Gong’s garden in Peking.
More to George’s taste were the excursions to Peking’s gardens and temples with Laurence Sickman and Prince Puju (Pu Xinyu), also known as Puru, the cousin of Puyi, and the last descendant of Prince Gong (Kung). As a painter and calligrapher, Sickman regarded him as the best Chinese artist of the mid-twentieth century. Puru, who specialized in landscapes reminiscent of the Song dynasty painters, rivaled Zhang Daiqian, a great painter and sometime forger, and was a friend to the expatriate aesthetes and aspiring calligraphers—Harold Acton, Sickman, and, of course, Kates. A crumbling palace, the former home of the Qianlong emperor’s favorite minister, Heshen, it was occupied by Prince Gong until his death in 1898. It was then that it attained its great splendor, becoming what was described as the greatest city garden in North China. During the 1930s, it was occupied by his descendant Puru, and it was there that he practiced the scholarly arts of painting and calligraphy. (Prince Gong’s mansion and its garden are now a museum.) Puru exemplified the “princely man, this pre-eminent man of breeding” whose very qualities Kates admired in his book. Acton, who was his pupil, described Puru’s wrist poised freely with his brush reflecting the slightest pressure:
The scene he was depicting on a long flat table had already permeated him before he touched the papers. Without any external panorama he painted peak after peak, and a road winding up from the sea to a sheltered hamlet; he peopled the crags with pines and the waves with fishing boats. The peaks receded into the distance and faded away. This complicated vertical scene was transmitted to the paper without hesitation. There was no possibility of making corrections, for each stroke was direct and decisive; it was hit or miss.
Attired in scholar’s robes, sitting on hard benches in unheated classrooms while attending lectures in Chinese at Peking University, Kates spent seven-plus years in close quarters to the Forbidden City, as memorably detailed in his classic account, The Years That Were Fat (1952), a paean to everyday life in the former capital. When not in class, he enjoyed a special privilege granted to only one other foreign Sinologist, John Ferguson: a special pass that allowed him to use the libraries and imperial archives in the Forbidden City. What would one wish to see? The Great Map of Peking in the reign of the Qianlong emperor, showing almost every single building as it existed in the eighteenth century? No trouble, yes indeed! An eighteenth-century copy of the Song dynasty scroll “Along the River during the Qingming Festival,” so famous that “one imperial minister had finally not scrupled to commit murder, to obtain it as his possession.” But of course!
His bucolic stay ended in spring 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbor, when it became impossible to live as an American under the Japanese.
Then the day came when, like a surgical incision, the first object was carted out into my courtyard, and delivered to a waiting crew. . . . I had at least determined not to be separated from my possessions—and how very many they seemed now to have become . . . as the large wooden cases now began swallowing even my tables and chairs . . . My carpets and rugs, my growing plants and flowers, the accustomed piles of books, all the amenities of the way in which I had lived, were gone. . . . Finally we reached bare rooms. Coolies carted the largest cases to a godown in the Legation Quarter, a number of straining figures slowly lifting the heavy boxes together, to get them over the high sills. The effect, at such moments, was uncomfortably like a funeral.
Rounds of farewell visits followed, and bitter tears were shed by his two houseboys at the rail station. “As all Chinese know from poems through their history,” wrote Kates, “partings are among the fateful and poignant moments of life.” Then they turned and disappeared while he sought his seat.
Kates spent the next two years in the stacks of the Library of Congress as a Guggenheim fellow, speaking more Chinese than English with the staff. He continued his work begun in Peking, which he incorporated into a long article on the origins of the Forbidden City that appeared in 1943, the year he returned to China. Flying from Assam in northeastern India over the Himalayas, the “Hump,” via Burma to Chungking (Chongqing), his mission was a tour of duty in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, attached to the U.S. Embassy. During this difficult-to-document period, his duties seem to have been collecting Chinese documents of cultural interest for the Library of Congress, and those with intelligence value for the OSS. He remained in Chungking until March 9, 1945, when he returned Stateside as a translator for the fledgling United Nations, at its birth in San Francisco. This led to a post described as “linguistic research” with the UN Secretariat, where among his accomplishments was translating the UN Charter into Chinese.
In 1946, the Brooklyn Museum, where Kates was briefly curator (1947–49), held an exhibit of his Ming furniture, the first such exhibit in the United States. Previously, collecting taste had favored lacquered, ornately carved examples suitable to Victorian interiors, suites of furniture—screens, “thrones,” curio cabinets—thought to have been favored by the residents of the Forbidden City. Kates preferred to emulate the taste of the scholar class, the literati, for objects of “elegant if unpretentious domesticity rather than for display at court.” His own “sober range of dignified furniture,” as he explained, “was one almost unknown to the West, whereas the complicated varieties were only too familiar, in part because of the general level of taste in our stupid nineteenth century, and in part also because of the vested interest of Philistine merchants.” A book followed, Chinese Household Furniture (1948), written with his sister Beatrice, an interior decorator, who had joined him in Peking in 1937–38, and illustrated with the photos of objects from the collections of friends, among them Gustav Ecke, a well-known authority and author of a book on Chinese domestic furniture.
But he feared that the gods might begrudge him those tranquil years spent in China, since, as he observed, “leaner years might of necessity follow those that were fat.” A series of odd jobs followed—consultancies, lectures, the occasional book or article—but the second half of Kates’s long life ended in a downward spiral. Chinese curatorial posts disappeared and academic positions vanished. These were the years when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy singled out the “China hands,” namely those who had had the misfortune of serving in Chungking during the war and who were blamed for “losing China” to the Reds.
Ming furniture collected by Kates, as shown at the Brooklyn Museum’s 1946 exhibit.
Three things further contributed to Kates’s plight: he was perhaps a homosexual, although closeted; he was Jewish; and there was little interest in China, now closed off by the Communists, in the 1950s. When his funds ran out, he sold his house, donated his books to the Quakers, and stored his slides with friends. His beloved seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese furniture was auctioned at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1955 after the “starvation summer” of 1954. Kates lamented: “The sale was jammed. Mr. Rockefeller and Princess Ileana came. . . . A few things were thrown away. Others realized impossible prices. My desk went for $1000. Yet it was my own desk, and is mine no longer. Part of me seems permanently frozen. . . .” Another letter elaborates, “The furniture has gone to places like Houston [three pieces from the sale are now in the Cleveland Museum], all bibelots are in a bookcase, or drawers, in reading and classrooms in the Chinese library, at Columbia—dead for eternity—and I sit typing this, punished, in a room filled with cheap furniture.”
“For me it is a season of learning how to live without a base, without the pleasures of beauty, the support of books, the fortification of privacy. The price of the Chinese years, which no one felt I was ‘entitled’ to, has come indeed unexpectedly high.” Yet his book has remained an oft-printed classic. “What really matters,” he wrote in 1956 after everything was gone, was that he had spent the valid part of his life “resuscitating, discovering, reviving, revivifying one phase of the history of a great people, the form of their classical ‘daily life’ which I had documented with seven years of reading of their books, and every variety of careful notes and transcripts, as well as all relevant objects large and small.”
Kates died, broke and forgotten, in a nursing home in Middletown, Rhode Island in 1990. Thus he was spared the bittersweet experience of witnessing the fad for Ming furniture that was to sweep the antiquities market in the mid-1990s. Part of its appeal lay in the rareness of the wood, much of it now extinct: the most prized objects being made out of a hardwood, known as huanghuali, “yellow flowering pear,” belonging to the rosewood family and found on Hainan Island in southern China. Robert Ellsworth, the “King of Ming,” dean of New York’s dealers of Asian art and author of an authoritative book on Chinese furniture, bought some of Kates’s pieces and offered them at the Seventh Avenue Armory antiques show in 1961. “The only reason this furniture is not more appreciated is that there is so little of it,” Ellsworth explained. “Chinese furniture is the only true cosmopolite of the decorative arts. It fits with any style if you give it enough room to breathe.”
Oxford’s historian of Chinese art, Craig Clunas, writes that during the Ming period, “furniture was not just a necessary adjunct to civilized living, it was part of a continuous moral and aesthetic discourse. The right furniture could be morally ennobling.” A scholar’s Ming house might include among its sparse furnishings “a long table for painting, a chair for writing, tall cupboards, stools and chairs, a platform for meditation, a basin stand, a screen, and a canopy bed.” George Kates would certainly agree. But during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, furniture viewed as elitist did not fare well. According to one Hong Kong dealer, Red Guards would “burn it, smash it, cut armrests off chairs, or punch a hole in a cabinet door.” As the unique mortise-and-tendon system of joining required little glue or nails, it was easily disassembled and hidden under piles of firewood, put out on the street, or sent to the countryside by owners who didn’t want to be caught and labeled bourgeois enemies of the state. Now, although you can buy Ming furniture in China, it is forbidden to export anything more than one hundred years old.
Six years after Kates’s death, in 1996, Christie’s New York auctioned 107 Ming and Qing chairs, tables, cabinets, and screens, setting a record of $11.2 million, nearly $4 million over the high estimate of $7.5 million. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased a classic painting table of huanghuali wood, dating from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, while the Minneapolis Institute of Art claimed the rarest object in the catalogue, a large seventeenth-century stationary screen with its original marble panel striated to resemble mountains (purchased with the help of two local collectors, Ruth and Bruce Dayton). As The New York Times art critic Rita Reif wrote, “It signaled the coming of age in the marketplace for Chinese furniture, which had long been overlooked by collectors.”
Ming furniture, with its rare woods and spare elegance, continues to enchant collectors. Christie’s 1996 sale coincided with a special exhibition, “Beyond the Screen: Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Centuries,” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, curated by Nancy Berliner. George Kates’s Ming furniture was no longer the orphan of the art world.