Hervé Rousseau

Hervé Rousseau

Biography

Born in Paris on March 29, 1967, Hervé Rousseau came of age in a city that taught him to see beauty as a serious pursuit. From an early age, he drew constantly — creating characters, animals, and stories that lived somewhere between the grotesque and the deeply funny.

His professional life unfolded at the intersection of ambition and independence. After being selected from a pool of 9,000 candidates for a position at Danone Group, one of the world's largest food companies, Rousseau quickly realized that corporate structure was not his natural habitat. He moved on to the Rémy Martin Group, where he spent five years managing three of the most prestigious champagne brands in the world — Krug, Piper-Heidsieck, and Charles Heidsieck. That experience planted a seed.

On September 26, 1997, he opened the first Flûte Champagne Bar in New York City. Seven more would follow — across Manhattan, London, Paris, and Miami Beach — establishing Rousseau as one of the most distinctive voices in champagne culture in the world.

Painting was always present, surfacing between chapters of a life lived at full speed. In 2026, he returned to it with intention. Working across abstraction and personal narrative, his canvases draw from philosophy, found objects, memory, and an obsession with the physical beauty of things. He cites Picasso, Chagall, and Matisse as his artistic north stars — painters who understood that a canvas should feel alive.

His first public exhibition opens on June 12, 2026, at Flûte Champagne Bar, New York City.

— Hervé Rousseau