Friedrich Wilhelm Brass, Creator of the Genossenschaft for Proletarian Art in Berlin: the First Experience of a Biography
Authors:   The State Hermitage Museum, Dedinkin M.O. 
Published: August 2022

The purpose of this article is to study the life and activity of Friedrich Wilhelm Brass, founder of Genossenschaft for Proletarian Art in Berlin (1920). Friedrich Wilhelm Brass (1873–1931) throughout his life sought to combine the commercial interests of a contemporary art dealer with the ideas of the social reorganization of the world. One of the first to call himself a communist in Germany, he created in 1920 in Berlin the Genossenschaft for Proletarian Art, the collection of which became the first contemporary western art brought to Soviet Russia. On the basis of this collection kept in the Hermitage and the Russian Academy of Arts, archival materials and work in museum collections in Germany, the history of the emergence of the Genossenschaft in Berlin in 1920, the composition of the participants and the biography of its creator are reconstructed. The relevance and novelty of the article is due to the lack of scientific research on this issue discovered by the author in his works. The life path of F.W. Brass is consistently considered. Trained as a craftsman in Krefeld, Brass made several attempts to establish an art trade there, primarily aimed at the workers’ milieu. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, he tried to interest the party in the prospect of such educational and agitational work. These initiatives proved to be financially untenable. Brass later worked at the German Workshops Hellerau, where the manufacturer Karl Schmidt implemented a project for the mass production of furniture designed by leading European designers and oriented to the widest and most democratic market. During the First World War, Brass was mobilized and spent several years in captivity in Russia, where he met the revolution and returned to Germany in 1919 as a convinced supporter of the communist reorganization of the world. After the November Revolution, several artistic organizations arose in Berlin, whose activities were directed towards the proletariat (the Workers’ Council for Art, the Association of Socialist Artists, the Union for Proletarian Culture, the Proletarian Theatre of Erwin Piscator, etc.). Among them was the Genossenschaft for Proletarian Art of the communist Brass, who collected the works of left-wing artists, mainly expressionists of the first and second generation. Like most of these artistic initiatives, the Brass Genossenschaft could not survive the economic crisis. The unique collection of the Genossenschaft was acquired during a trip to Germany by Comintern Chairman G. Zinoviev in October 1920 and brought to Soviet Russia. Later, during the years of the Weimar Republic, Brass no longer undertook such ambitious projects, continuing to trade in the works of left-wing artists. He worked in Hagen and Düsseldorf, where he died in 1931. The author comes to the conclusion that the figure of Brass represents a new type of entrepreneur for the art market of the 20th century, focused primarily on the promotion of the latest art among the workers, agitation for a new life in the language of art.