Courtesy Hpetit21 via Wiki Commons
After Sotheby’s was cleared of any wrongdoing in the Yves Bouvier affair last year, the art world thought it had finally thumbed through the final chapter. But no story in this business ever truly ends. And like Hollywood’s penchant for remakes and sequels, the saga is gearing up for yet another installment: the Swiss art dealer has now filed a sweeping petition in US federal court to track down 91 artworks he claims are rightfully his.
Bouvier’s filing—known as a Section 1782 application, a mechanism that permits US discovery for use in foreign litigation—asks a New York judge to compel roughly 15 major banks and two auction houses to hand over information on the whereabouts of the disputed art. The request is tied to Hong Kong legal proceedings initiated in October against French dealer Pascal de Sarthe, whom Bouvier accuses of failing to return works allegedly placed with him for safekeeping. De Sarthe disputes that Bouvier owns the pieces at all.
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In the application, Bouvier argues that he needs access to privileged financial and transactional records held in New York in order to establish both ownership and location of the 91 works—said to be worth around $100 million. Sample subpoenas filed alongside the petition list paintings and works on paper by Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Brice Marden, Picasso, Warhol, and others, with a particularly large tranche attributed to the Franco-Chinese painter Chu Teh-Chun.
The dispute marks an unexpected turn for Bouvier, who spent most of the past decade defending himself against Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev’s allegation that he had overcharged him by as much as $1 billion on 38 blue-chip artworks. Those accusations, made across multiple jurisdictions, were rejected by every court that heard them. Rybolovlev then turned his accusations against Sotheby’s, accusing the auction house of aiding and abetting the alleged deception. In January 2024, following a four-week trial in the Southern District of New York, a jury cleared Sotheby’s on all counts.
Now, Bouvier is the one leaning on the courts. In his new filings, he claims he was “blacklisted by auction houses” after the 2015 litigation with Rybolovlev, forcing him to rely on informal arrangements with de Sarthe and longtime associate Jean-Marc Peretti for the storage and maintenance of his works. According to Bouvier, the breakdown of those relationships has left him unable to locate art he entrusted to them—prompting the Hong Kong action and this transnational discovery effort.
De Sarthe’s attorney, Amelia Brankov, has asked the New York court to delay or deny the application, calling the request “sweeping and invasive.” She argues that the Hong Kong court has not yet determined whether Bouvier owns the artworks at all, making any U.S.-ordered discovery premature: “The discovery sought here can only be useful… if Mr. Bouvier is, in fact, the owner of the artworks at issue, a contested question,” she wrote in a December 8 letter.
Bouvier’s subpoena targets are not small players. In addition to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, he seeks information from Citibank, JPMorgan, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and several others—along with The Clearing House Payment Company, which processes interbank transfers. The filings ask each institution to produce records relating to more than two dozen entities allegedly tied to de Sarthe or Peretti.
Neither auction house commented on the filings and a representative of Yves Bouvier did not immediately return a request for comment. According to Urgent Matter, which first reported on Bouvier’s filing, De Sarthe has previously said that the works were consigned to him by Peretti, not Bouvier.
The Hong Kong court held its first hearing in early October to address injunctions, preservation orders, and disclosure requests. Whether the New York court will agree to open its own discovery channels—effectively exporting financial intelligence to support a foreign dispute—will likely depend on how firmly the Hong Kong court resolves the threshold question of ownership.
For now, the latest twist in the long-running Bouvier-Rybolovlev constellation underscores a familiar truth about the upper reaches of the art market: even when the book appears to close, the sequel is already in development.
