Kates was a success personally and academically at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1922. As Henry Francis notes in a letter to Fergus Bordewich: “We both belonged to the Liberal Club where we lunched continuously with a group whom we kept contact most of our lives…certainly for me my roommate Alexander Mackay-Smith, fellow art majors, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and his roommate, George Kauf Keiser Charles Poletti, later Lieutenant Governor of New York and John Caddington, today a distinguished genealogist and among other members Virgil Thompson, his friend Briggs Buchanan, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana." Kates joined the Liberal Club and formed a close friendship with Henry Sayles Francis (later Curator of Cleveland Museum of Art) and a number of other prominent students of the arts. There he was taught and mentored by Paul Sachs, Director of the Fogg Art Museum, as well as by Roger Merriman. He did not return home until 1919.Īfter a year working in New York City, Kates enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1920 to study History and Fine Arts. In 1917 when America entered World War I, Kates enlisted and served as a medical orderly for a year, before being promoted to the rank of second lieutenant and serving as a translator (Kates was a fluent speaker of French and German). Kates spent two years studying at Columbia University School of Architecture, with an intervening year during which he sailed aboard a Belgian cadet training ship all the way from New York to Cape Town, Calcutta and Melbourne, and back again. Kates attended middle and high school at Horace Mann preparatory school, then at Morningside Heights, New York, and graduated in 1913. The Kates family lived in the fashionable and luxurious Ansonia Hotel on Broadway when it opened in 1905 until 1914. In Mexico City George briefly attended a German high school. Sometimes the whole family travelled abroad together, two parents, George, his sister Beatrice, a nanny and governess, to Chile, Argentina, Cuba and Mexico. His work took him on numerous voyages to countries throughout Central and South America. In 1896 the family moved to New York City where Norbert Kates built a successful export business, selling manufacturing goods and equipment to Latin American buyers. Both parents were Jewish, although Kates was brought up in a secular household. His mother was a second generation American, the child of German immigrants. His father, Norbert, was an immigrant from the Ukrainian city of Brody. Kates was born in Avondale, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio on November 27, 1895. also as an important collector of Chinese antiques and for his contributions to the understanding of the Chinese decorative arts. Several authors associate him with Old Beijing, the first half of the 20th century and the traditional way of life. Kates published articles about Chinese history and decorative arts and contributed to two books about author Willa Cather. From 1947 to 1949 he was Asian Curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Army during World War I, he also served with the State Department in China during World War II. Kates graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1922 and was awarded a D.Phil. He also wrote one of the first texts on Chinese classical furniture- Chinese Household Furniture and put together a significant private collection of Ming style hardwood furniture. His memoir of life in 1930s Beijing- The Years That Were Fat, Peking 1933-1940 is a widely read memoir of pre-revolution China. George Norbert Kates (Novem– March 23, 1990) was an American exponent of classical Chinese culture and decorative arts.
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