Membership card for the Passive Members of the Die Brücke

This lot is the membership card issued to each of the Passive Members of Die Brücke. Passive members constituted donors and supporters of the artists' collective who received the group’s annual print portfolios. The present membership card belonged to Dr. Willy Wygodzinski (1869-1921), a German economist and professor at the University of Bonn. Wygodzinski became a passive member of the artists’ association following their 1907 exhibition and would go on to collect several works by Die Brücke artists, including Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Pechstein.
Together with his wife, Vally Wygodzinski (née Cohn), an accomplished painter and translator based in Paris and Bonn, Dr. Wygodzinski was an active supporter of German art and artists before the First World War. Alongside his passive membership in Die Brücke, Willy Wygodzinski was also a member of the Düsseldorf-based "Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler” ("Separate League of West German Art Lovers and Artists") and the Cologne-based Gereonsklub. He sat on the board of directors of Bonn’s Villa Obernier Museum in the early 1910s.