It was Saturday night of New York Fashion Week, and everywhere Emmanuel Perrotin turned, hands were being thrust at him.
Ronnie Fieg, the founder of Kith, the cool-kid street wear brand, congratulated him. Johan Lindberg, the Swedish fashion designer and party fixture, paid his respects. Next up were Alexandre Arnault, the 26-year-old son of Bernard Arnault, and his younger brother Frederic, who seemed to take in the festive atmosphere with an appraiser’s eye.
Also swirling around Mr. Perrotin in the crush of street-style poseurs were beau monde bohos like Kaws, Alexandre de Betak, André Saraiva and Jefferson Hack.
From the sidewalk, outside the old Beckenstein Home Fabrics building on Orchard Street, it looked like yet another A-list party on the fashion circuit. But inside, as everyone in attendance knew, this was the latest art opening orchestrated by Mr. Perrotin, 50, the highly sociable gallery owner from Paris, who has emerged as one of the savviest showmen on the global commercial art scene.
Wearing a blue-and-white seersucker jacket and chalk-white Adidas sneakers, he darted around his three-story Galerie Perrotin with the manic energy of a hotel manager in a French sex farce. “I feel it’s important to create a bridge between different worlds,” Mr. Perrotin said of the eclectic mix of artists, hype-beasts and fashionistas churning around him.
Known for discovering the superstar artists Takashi Murakami and Maurizio Cattelan (as well as Damien Hirst, the one that got away), Mr. Perrotin now has six galleries — in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and, most recently, Shanghai — that are as much Instagram-friendly party spaces as they are places to view and buy contemporary art.
“He understood, from the very beginning, social media and its impact and its ability to reach audiences which are not typical museum or gallerygoers,” said Daniel Arsham, 38, the pop-dystopian artist whose new show, which included a full-size replica of a decaying DeLorean, was opening. “There’s a lot of people here tonight that this is not their usual thing to do.”
After the opening, guests continued to the rooftop, which offered expansive views of Lower Manhattan, an open bar, trays of canapés and a D.J. booth facing a dance floor. Around 11 p.m., multicolored Mylar balloons and sheet cake were brought out for Mr. Arsham’s birthday.
“He doesn’t do dinner like Larry does,” said Jean-Paul Engelen, the deputy chairman of Phillips, referring to Larry Gagosian, the mega-gallery owner. “He does a party.”
Selling Art on the Dance Floor
Mr. Perrotin’s path up through the commercial art world was different than the route most gallery owners take.
Raised in a middle-class household on the outskirts of Paris, he made his first art connections as a middle-school dropout at age 16, when he met the daughter of Gilbert Brownstone, a gallery owner, at Les Bains-Douches nightclub.
By 17, he was helping to run a small gallery started by Charles Cartwright, who exhibited works by Marina Abramovic, George Condo and others. “Even on the dance floor, I was able to make calculations about margins” from selling art, Mr. Perrotin said.
It proved to be a short apprenticeship. By 21 he opened his first gallery, inside a large apartment he rented in the Third Arrondissement of Paris. During the day, he shared it with Hedi Slimane, then an unknown designer, who used it as a showroom. At night, Mr. Perrotin slept on the sofa.
From there, his art cachet rose rapidly with an amazing string of emerging artists. In 1991, when he was 23, he staged Mr. Hirst’s first commercial show. (Mr. Hirst decamped to Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery shortly after.)
The following year, Mr. Perrotin signed Mr. Cattelan after meeting him at an art opening in Milan. “He had a pure energy that was very communicative,” Mr. Perrotin said. “I clicked right away.”
In 1993, he stumbled upon Mr. Murakami at an art fair in Yokohama, Japan. They hit it off, even though they didn’t speak a common language, communicating instead by exchanging drawings. A year later, for a New York art fair, Mr. Perrotin created three T-shirts featuring Mr. Murakami’s big-breasted Hiropon figures. When they sold out, Mr. Perrotin offered him a solo show in Paris.
In those days, Mr. Perrotin was selling works for $500. Those same artists can now command more than $15 million at auction; a sculpture by Mr. Cattelan that depicts Hitler, for example, fetched $17 million in 2016.
Mr. Perrotin represents around 50 artists, including the conceptualist Paola Pivi, 47, who makes life-size feathered polar bears in cartoon colors; and the minimalist Claude Rutault, 76, who requires canvases to be painted the same color as the surface on which they’re hung.
Newer artists still speak of Mr. Perrotin as not just a gallery owner, but also as a mentor and a friend. “I met Emmanuel when I was 22 years old, fresh from my graduation,” Mr. Arsham wrote last month on Instagram on the eve of his 15th show. “He came for a visit to my 200-square-feet foot studio with no windows in Miami.”
“He’s an old school dealer like Leo Castelli who is personal friends with many of his artists,” he added, “yet futuristic in his embrace of social media and the egalitarian effect its reach can bring.”
Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of the New Museum in Lower Manhattan, who has known Mr. Perrotin for over 20 years, takes a broader view.
“The history of Emmanuel’s gallery is a history of art in the 21st century,” Mr. Gioni said. “Emmanuel was part of a change in the ’90s that art was part of not only popular culture and fashion, but was meant to be part of everyday life.”
Mr. Gioni paused before adding: “In the process, of course, he threw a few legendary parties, and ran basically a club business on the side.”
‘Art Party of the Year’
In Paris, the capital of his Napoleonic art empire, Mr. Perrotin hopped around different spaces before settling four years ago into the grand ballroom in a 17th-century hôtel particulier, along the trendier edge of the Marais district.
Along with an 18th-century mansion nearby, he has 25,000 square feet of gallery space — and that’s not including the stately apartment a few steps away where he lives with his wife and toddler son.
The gallery’s visitor-friendly posture, proximity to high-fashion boutiques and buzzy art openings were seen as an egalitarian innovation. Traditionally, Paris dealers “wanted to speak only to art critics and clients, and not waste their time with the public,” Mr. Perrotin said. “The galleries had a buzzer; it was intimidating to go. Even the documents to explain things weren’t given to everybody, only to journalists.”
Mr. Gioni put it more bluntly: “His attitude helped transform the relationship of everyday citizens to art.”
In recognition of Mr. Perrotin’s cultural perestroika, the French culture minister, Françoise Nyssen, made him an officer the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the country’s cultural honor roll in July. (Similarly, Mr. Perrotin attended the White House state dinner last April for President Emmanuel Macron of France.)
No such barriers, of course, exist in New York. So when Mr. Perrotin opened his first gallery in Manhattan in 2013, in a former bank on Madison Avenue that he shared with the Dominique Lévy Gallery, he didn’t spare any expenses.
To make a splash on the city’s jaded art scene, he hosted a lavish after-party at the Russian Tea Room, spooning lobster and caviar for 1,000 guests including the musicians Pharrell Williams and Swizz Beatz; the fashion designers Olivier Theyskens, Carly Cushnie and Michelle Ochs; and art-world bigwigs including Peter Brant, Simon de Pury and Jeffrey Deitch.
The top floor was transformed into a carnival, where guests competed to win miniature sculptures by KAWS, plaster facsimiles of gadgets by Mr. Arsham and plushy toys by Mr. Murakami. The art blog Arrested Motion called it the “art party of the year.”
The Upper East Side space, however, proved too small for his ambitions. Last year, after a meticulous renovation, he moved into the old Beckenstein Home Fabrics at 130 Orchard Street. It offers 25,000 square feet of space, including a glorious rooftop where Alicia Keys performed a mini-concert this summer for the opening of a show by the artist JR.
Mr. Perrotin is also in the process of building a duplex apartment on the roof. As with his first gallery in Paris, he likes to sleep near his art.
“I’m very happy and proud of the parties, but don’t attribute my success to that,” Mr. Perrotin said, surveying the scene at the Arsham opening. “For sure, that’s because of the artists.”
