Gustav Emil Wilhelm Ecke (13 June 1896 – 17 December 1971) was a German and later American historian of art and curator.
[2] Ecke was born in Bonn, Germany, a center of German Expressionism and Russian Constructivism and made lively by refugees from their home countries.
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.
[5] In Beijing he joined a group of foreign residents, such as George Kates, Laurence Sickman, and the German photographer Hedda Morrison, who were the first to collect and catalog classic Chinese furniture.
Photographs, some full-page, and drawings by Ecke's collaborator Professor Yang Yue, show the construction of beds, chairs, tables, wardrobes, wash stands, clothes racks and other domestic items.
[5] Chinese Domestic Furniture in Photographs and Measured Drawings was published in a limited portfolio edition of 200 copies in Beijing in 1944, then reprinted as a standard book by Tuttle in 1962 and Dover Publications in 1985.
The classical style of furniture came to dominate the tastes of American collectors after the war partly because of this Bauhaus influence which Ecke and other scholars trained in Europe conveyed.