A Swiss art dealer, Yves Bouvier, is at the centre of a long-running legal saga after a French court ruled that he and associate Olivier Thomas must face trial over the mysterious disappearance of more than 70 Picasso artworks from a storage unit rented by Catherine Hutin, Jacqueline Picasso’s daughter, in 2008.
The latest decision, by the Paris appeals court, rejected Bouvier’s bid to halt the proceedings against him. It reopened questions about some of Picasso’s less-known works, with some speculating they may have been stolen.
The dispute started in 2015, when Hutin, the only daughter of Picasso’s second wife, discovered that close to 70 of her mother’s portraits and other works had disappeared from a storage unit in one of the suburbs of Paris. The facility, controlled by Art Transit International—a company Bouvier controls—had been partly leased through his then-collaborator, Thomas, in 2008. Hutin’s questions turned urgent after discovering that two of the missing paintings, extremely rare portraits of her mother, had been sold in 2013 to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $28.5 million. That sale raised questions that quickly escalated into formal allegations against Bouvier and Thomas.
Anne-Sophie Nardon, a lawyer for Hutin, has seized on the fact that her client “has been waiting for a decade for justice and restitution.” Frustration mounted as a conservator reached out to Hutin, saying he had been hired by Thomas in 2012 to do “light conservation work” on several of her missing pieces, some of which cropped up later at Bouvier’s Geneva Freeport facility. These revelations presented a grim picture of the underworld of high-value art storage and led Hutin to formally accuse Bouvier and Thomas of misappropriating her family’s assets.
As investigators dug deeper, the case grew more complex: they found photographs of some of the missing Picasso works on Thomas’ computer. Both men deny the allegations. Bouvier claimed the transaction with Hutin was aboveboard, saying he bought the portraits from the late gallery owner Jean-Marc Aittouares. He also claimed to have paid Hutin €9 million for the works at issue. However, investigators discovered the sum was linked to selling 13 unrelated paintings previously sold through Thomas. Bouvier says the ongoing case has been prejudiced against him because of his previous battles with Rybolovlev, with whom he settled a high-profile lawsuit in 2023.
To Hutin, the ruling signals long-awaited progress toward what her lawyer calls a “decisive step toward the truth.” But Bouvier’s attorney, Philippe Valent, wasted no words in assailing the court’s decision for what he described as “frenzied corporatism,” promising to appeal. Valent added, “Ms Hutin filed an absurd complaint for the alleged theft of works she had already been paid for,” underlining a contentious way forward for both parties.
Bouvier and Thomas have been indicted for possessing stolen goods; the latter also faces fraud charges. For the most part, the trial will reveal something about the modus operandi of the art world, the morality of art handling and resale, and the brokers of such power. The court has now ruled that there is no basis for Bouvier’s claims of investigative bias. Still, with his defence promising to continue its appeals, this case will continue to rivet the art world and perhaps redefine legal norms in high-value art transactions.