Lacquered Table with Everted Flanges

With Jörg Trübner (1901-1930), China, by 1930 [1];

To his wife, Gertrude Trübner (1895-1972), New York and Geneva, on joint account with her brother-in-law, Edgar Worch (1880-1972), Berlin, Geneva and New York, 1930-February 3, 1945 [2];

Purchased from Trübner and Worch by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1945.

NOTES:

[1] According to Langdon Warner, Nelson-Atkins Advisor on Asian Art, in a letter to Paul Gardner, Director, April 4, 1932, Warner had accepted Gertrude Trübner’s offer to lend this table and a lacquer screen to the Nelson-Atkins. “They were bought,” Warner wrote, “in China by [Jörg] Trübner before he died. He was, as you perhaps know, the most trusted and best trained European dealer in Chinese things.” Jörg Trübner oversaw purchases in China for his family’s gallery in Berlin, which specialized in Chinese ceramics [see note 2]. He died of black measles on his third trip to China in 1930. Nelson-Atkins Archives, William Rockhill Trust Office Records, RG80/05, series III, box 9, folder 71.

[2] Gertrude Trübner and Edgar Worch lent this table to the Nelson-Atkins in 1932, and it remained on loan to the museum until its acquisition in February 1945. See letters between Worch and Lindsay Hughes, Acting Curator, between November 10, 1944 and February 11, 1945, Nelson-Atkins Archives, RG92 Lindsay Hughes Files, box 1, folder 23. German-born Worch began his career working for his uncle Adolphe (1843-1915), a dealer of Chinese and Japanese art, in Paris in 1902, and travelled to China on business annually between 1906 and 1914. During World War I, the Paris business was sequestered by the French government as enemy property and Worch returned to Germany, where he enlisted in the army and was wounded at the battle of Verdun. Worch’s wife Hedwig was the sister of Gertrude Trübner, and after the war, Worch became managing director, and later co-owner, of the Trübner family’s gallery in Berlin. He moved to Geneva in 1932 and later New York in 1938. For more on Worch, see Patrizia Jirka-Schmitz, “The Trade in Far Eastern Art in Berlin during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933),” Journal for Art Market Studies 3 (2018): 4-8.