Bernard Poissonnier

Bernard Poissonnier was a French art collector, writer, and curator based in Paris with an interest in modern art and literature.

Poissonnier began assembling his collection during the interwar period, but little is known about how he acquired it. He owned at least three early works on paper by Picasso: Woman in Profile (1902–03; Zervos, vol. VI, no. 437), Couple in a Tavern (1904; Daix D. XI. 17), and Kneeling Nude (1904; Daix D. XI. 21). His collection also included several works by Juan Gris, among them Bottle of Rosé Wine (1914; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection), Bottle of Rum and Newspaper (1914; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), The White Tablecloth (1912–16; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Hot Water Jug and Bowl (1916; Cooper with Potter 1977, no. 172), and Jug and Water Bottle (1925; Cooper and Potter 1977, no. 502). Poissonnier also acquired works by Paul Klee and at least five paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, which for a time the collector placed on deposit at the Kunstmuseum Basel.

During World War II, Poissonnier was active in the art market and was linked to Karl Haberstock, the most prominent Nazi art dealer active in Paris. In addition, he took interest in French-German artistic exchanges during the Occupation. For example, in 1941 he published a report in the periodical Comoedia about a group of thirteen French artists invited by Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda to visit Germany, among them André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Kees van Dongen. The following year Poissonier reviewed the exhibition of the German sculptor Arno Breker at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris for Beaux-Arts.

A close friend of Jacqueline Apollinaire since 1936, Poissonnier contributed to cementing the legacy of her late husband, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1952, together with Robert Mallet, he compiled and issued a group of previously unpublished poems by Apollinaire. Later in that decade, participating as the General Secretary of the Apollinaire Committee, he worked on the construction of the monument dedicated to the poet in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris (Square Laurent-Prache) for which Picasso donated a sculpture. In the 1980s, Poissonnier gifted a collection of Apollinaire’s manuscripts to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.