The Art-World Insider Who Went Too Far

Bouvier’s father, Jean-Jacques, started as an apprentice at Natural Le Coultre in 1953. In 1982, he was able to buy the company. Yves, having dropped out of college, joined him, and brought his appetite for risk to the unlikely domain of freight. Bouvier combines a Calvinist reserve with a delight in doing the unthinkable. “If you tell me it is not possible, I will say, O.K., I will do it,” he told me once. He took on spectacular jobs—the transport of an eighty-five-ton industrial furnace, a U.B.S. office move in Geneva—but was also drawn to what was fragile, beautiful, and expensive. Bouvier speaks an imperfect, gestural English, but he explained that becoming a shipper allowed him to immerse himself in “the feeling and the difficulty of art.” He had no formal training, just what passed through his hands. “It started with the touch,” he said. “You have all the panoply: small, huge, it’s with value, with no value. You have everything, so you learn.”

Shipping also introduced Bouvier to the complicated lives of the rich—their taxes and their divorces—and the other ancillary trades that help the art world go around: restorers, framers, hired experts, operators of tiny galleries in Paris clinging on from sale to sale. He realized they all had needs of their own. When he took over the running of Natural Le Coultre from his father, at the age of thirty-four, Bouvier sold off the company’s general moving business and specialized in art. Unlike other shippers, however, he never considered stopping at logistics.

“You have to get up early tomorrow, too? We have so much in common!”

Cartoon by P. C. Vey

Quietly, he began his own forays into the marketplace. “I was in the shadows,” he said. The first picture that Bouvier bought was a small gouache by Max Ernst from an auction house in Geneva. (He has a collection of twentieth-century furniture and design.) Alongside his work at Natural Le Coultre, he started to dabble, making himself useful to the people he knew. Bouvier financed purchases that dealers couldn’t afford on their own. He sorted out cash flow and bills. He became adept at setting up offshore companies—Diva, Blancaflor, Eagle Overseas—to enable galleries to buy specific works and mask the identity of other investors in a transaction. Bouvier is an opportunist. Pitch him and he will decide if he is in or out. “It is always a question of what I will earn on the deal,” he said.

Within a few years, Bouvier was buying and selling pictures on a serious scale, interacting almost solely with other dealers. “When you buy, it is always to sell,” he said. “You always have the buyer before you have the seller.” On August 16, 2000, he bought a Paul Gauguin landscape, “Paysage aux Trois Arbres,” from Peintures Hermès, a Swiss gallery associated with the Wildenstein family of art dealers, for $9.5 million. Two weeks later, he sold the picture to Mandarin Trading, a Bahamas-based art fund, for $11.3 million, making a profit of sixteen per cent. Mandarin Trading later sued the Wildensteins for fraud, alleging that it was the victim of a scam to inflate the value of the painting. The case was dismissed in 2011. I once asked Bouvier what drew him to particular propositions. “In the mountains, it was the same,” he replied. “I go in the place which is the most complicated, the most risky place.”

Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, first met Bouvier in August, 2002, during a visit to the Geneva Freeport to pick up a painting by Marc Chagall. Rybolovlev was in his late thirties and worth nearly a billion dollars. He had moved his wife, Elena, and young daughter to Switzerland in 1995, after acquiring control of Uralkali, a state-owned potash-mining company, at the age of twenty-nine. He then went back to Russia, where he spent eleven months in custody after being accused of ordering the contract killing of a rival. (He was later cleared of all charges.)