Art Market
Maxwell Love
Portrait of Pascal de Sarthe and Vincent de Sarthe. Courtesy of DE SARTHE.
Pascal de Sartes has always been a challenger of the status quo. A seasoned dealer with a passion for emerging art, he has worked on three continents in a career spanning five decades: Europe, North America and Asia. His journey in the art world began with a runaway boarding school as a teenager, and took him through the Paris art scene, San Francisco and Arizona, before finally setting up his flagship gallery in Hong Kong in 2010.
DE SARTHE is a leading gallery in Hong Kong's art market today. Located in Wong Chuk Hang, the heart of Hong Kong's art district, the gallery is committed to nurturing a new generation of artists by prioritizing engagement and innovation. This mission is strengthened by DE SARTHE Residency (deSAR), an annual summer program launched in 2017 and currently home to 32-year-old Chinese artist Liao Chia-ming.
The gallery is a family business: De Sarte's son, Vincent, is still based in the US and reopened a branch of the gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2022.
Today, De Sarte believes the art industry must nurture a younger generation of artists and protect their work from speculative market fluctuations. “The speculative nature of the art market often pressures young artists to create commercially successful works, rather than freely exploring their creative vision,” De Sarte said. His new mission in Hong Kong is to support the growing number of young artists around 30 years old and under who are free to break boundaries.
Chasing the American Dream
Installation view from the exhibition “French Impressionism: Drawings and Watercolors,” DE SARTHE, San Francisco, 1983. Courtesy of DE SARTHE.
As a child, de Sarte couldn't wait to get home from boarding school to draw. He bought books by French painter Chaïm Soutine and began drawing whenever he could. In the French countryside, he dreamed of becoming an artist in America. “Just a little pretentious guy from a little village, I told everyone I was going to live in America, and that's when art really became a part of me,” he recalls.
So, as a teenage and talented artist, he ran away from boarding school and, instead of returning to his hometown, went to Paris to pursue his dreams. In 1978, when he was in his early twenties, a friend let him rent space in a shopping mall. There, he sold the work of his friends and the French avant-garde, and even held exhibitions of his own work. Although it certainly wasn't profitable, the business was a start for the young painter.
After her daughter was born at age 23, de Sarte took the plunge and fulfilled her dream of emigrated to the United States, moving to San Francisco with just $1,700 in her bank account and eventually opening her own eponymous gallery in the US in 1981, where she sold works by Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne and Mary Cassatt.
Upon arriving in San Francisco, de Sarte started from scratch, selling paintings on the streets and in his neighborhood, gradually building a clientele and opening his first permanent gallery in Union Square, where he hosted exhibitions of modern masters and impressionists, including a 1982 group show featuring works by Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet.
But the young gallerist wasn't about to rest on his laurels: he soon traveled to Japan, where he struck up a friendship with Yamamoto Susumu, the influential director of the Fuji Television Gallery. Under Yamamoto's tutelage, de Sarte developed a wide network of contacts in the Japanese art market, selling historical Western artworks.
At the same time, he recalls, “my love for contemporary art returned,” which led him to organize a show of Dennis Oppenheim's work, which became part of the artist's installation at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. As de Cert gained momentum throughout the '80s, he saw a growing interest in Asian art, bringing contemporary Chinese artists like Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-chun, as well as Japanese artists like Miyajima Tatsuo, Endo Toshikatsu and Kawamata Tadashi to California. “I thought being in America, in California, meant being at the center of the world,” de Cert tells Artsy from his Hong Kong office.
In 1990, the gallerist shifted his focus to prioritizing contemporary art and relocated to Los Angeles. Early solo exhibitions at the space included shows by Helmut Newton, Jochen Goertz, and Alain Jacquet. But his stay in Los Angeles didn't last long, and de Sarte left the city again, this time relocating to Scottsdale, Arizona.
“I've always loved Arizona,” he said. “I love Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and the Phoenix area. I love the scenery, I love the nature. My wife and I love the light of Arizona, I love the pace, I love the peace. Back then, the population of the old metropolitan area was 600,000. Now it's over 5 million.”
Arizona to Asia
De Sarte moved to Arizona to raise his children, and his gallery grew along with the Southwestern city, but the connections he made in Asia continued to draw his business to cultural epicenters across the Pacific, and in 2010 he took another leap, this time opening a gallery in Hong Kong.
“We wanted to start afresh, not with contemporary art,” he said of his initial efforts. Starting from the gallery's classical art roots, De Cert established his Hong Kong gallery as a place to present museum-quality exhibitions of works by renowned artists, from Auguste Rodin to Robert Indiana.
“I think if you really understand our history and the work of our artists, you can always understand what quality means and what quality is, so that's what I've always strived for,” De Sarte says. “It's a lot of fun to create classic pieces.”
Auguste Rodin, installation view at the exhibition “Rodin: Bronzes, Exceptional Early Casts”, DE SARTHE, Hong Kong, 2013. Courtesy of DE SARTHE, Hong Kong.
As de Sarte spent more time in Hong Kong, he became fascinated with the new and exciting generation of artists in the area, many of whom he noticed were embracing new technology and wanted to support them. “I wanted to be part of that conversation,” he said.
“I was meeting young artists who were doing different things that were pushing the boundaries and answering questions from art history of the past while also positioning themselves for the future,” he recalls. These artists were “bringing the avant-garde back into the conversation and in the process using new technologies and commenting on how we as humans evolve within these new technologies.”
De Sarte hopes to nurture the careers and community of these artists with his Hong Kong space, and he has quickly made a name for himself as an artist who platforms boundary-pushing art from a roster that includes 20 contemporary artists, including Kayson Wang and Mak2.
Major changes in the art market
De Certé, a dealer with extensive experience on both the primary and secondary sides of the art market, is somewhat skeptical of many aspects of today's art world. He objects to what he calls the speculative side of the market. “This narrows the public's focus and makes it very difficult for emerging or lesser known artists to enter the market,” he said.
Rather, De Sarte's approach is born out of a passion for understanding how art interacts with art history. He draws inspiration from well-known gallery models such as Marian Goodman Gallery and Castelli Gallery, which he points out prioritize building long-term legacies and collector bases for their artists. De Sarte cites Leo Castelli as a key mentor, saying, “I learned a lot from Leo Castelli, because you have to create a market for artists, and you want a healthy market.”
Wang Xin, “Every Artist Should Have a Solo Exhibition”, installation view at DE SARTHE Hong Kong, 2016. © Wang Xin. Courtesy of DE SARTHE, Hong Kong.
De Sarte continues to work today, defying these odds and drawing inspiration from them. The gallerist's role is also that of ambassador. He recalled a private roundtable discussion at an eight-artist presentation at Art Basel in Hong Kong earlier this year, with artists including Wang Xin and Zhong Wei, that encouraged critical engagement with the artists and their work.
“I'm trying to create a movement and a narrative with young artists who are just beginning to define what they want to achieve as artists… and I want to give them a platform,” he explained.
Maxwell Love
Maxwell Rabb is a staff writer at Artsy.
