Filmmakers Andreas Dalsgaard and Christoph Jörg Unpack the Art World’s Biggest Scandal
For more than a decade, a bitter feud between a Russian oligarch and a Swiss shipping tycoon-cum-art dealer has played out in courtrooms, magazines and art world gossip. The broad strokes of the story are oft repeated: Dmitry Rybolovlev filed lawsuits across the globe accusing Yves Bouvier of defrauding him by wildly inflating the prices of artworks he acquired for the collector between 2003 and 2014, overcharging him by more than $1 billion for 38 masterworks by some of the most famous artists of all time, including Vincent van Gogh, Amadeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. What has largely remained out of the headlines, however, is the infrastructure—the global tax loopholes and art-world policy of “discretion”—that made the so-called Bouvier Affair possible in the first place.
The Oligarch and the Art Dealer, a new documentary series co-created by Andreas Dalsgaard and Christoph Jörg whose pilot premiered at Sundance, enters this sealed world, promising a play-by-play account of the alleged billion-dollar swindle. The duo met making The Lost Leonardo, the 2021 documentary tracing the discovery and subsequent sales of a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—one that Bouvier purchased for Rybolovlev. It was during the filming of The Lost Leonardo that Bouvier expressed a desire to tell his side of the dispute.
“After years and years of being hung out to dry as the biggest fraud story in the history of the art world, he wanted to tell his story—to set the record straight,” Dalsgaard, who also directed the series, told Observer. “And for us, this was both a unique opportunity to have someone who was not just an insider in the art world. He was possibly the biggest art dealer in a period of time.”
The filmmakers recognized immediately that this story was about more than just a high-profile dispute between two ultra-wealthy men. It offered a window into how the art world operates within global structures of power. “I was always fascinated by how the art market functions, particularly at the highest end,” co-creator and producer Jörg said. “Who are the tastemakers? Who are the actors shaping the different dynamics behind the scenes? How are art and power intertwined? These are subjects that I’m attracted to, and this one was a no-brainer.”
Bouvier speaks on the record throughout the series, which sketches his rise alongside his relationship with Rybolovlev and situates both men within a rapidly changing art market. Before he began dealing art, Bouvier transformed his family’s shipping business, Natural Le Coultre, into a renowned art transport and storage company. It became the largest tenant of the Geneva Freeport, a facility that allows artworks to remain untaxed and is therefore popular with the international elite. It was there that Bouvier met Rybolovlev, a secretive Russian billionaire and new art collector who had relocated to Switzerland and was trying to break into the exclusive upper echelons of the market.
Bouvier was dubbed the “freeport king,” a moniker that, for Dalsgaard, indicates the influence he wielded. “A character like Bouvier was not only a huge art dealer,” he said, “but was also building the infrastructure of this way to use art to hide money, or to store money away through art.” Rare footage shot inside the Geneva Freeport itself gives viewers a glimpse into what the writer Oliver Bullough has described as “Moneyland,” the mysterious, extraterritorial zones in which wealth is insulated from public oversight.
The Oligarch and the Art Dealer outlines how the rhetoric of “discretion” that pervades the art market operates beyond mere etiquette. It was under this banner that Bouvier and Rybolovlev began working together, with Bouvier acting as an indispensable intermediary who ensured that sellers and Rybolovlev never communicated directly—an arrangement that would later prove central to the dispute. (In practice, this “discretion” obscured the scale of Bouvier’s markups.) In a market structured to facilitate the movement of vast sums of money with minimal scrutiny, the line between privacy and concealment is easily blurred. “Discretion is a very veneered way to talk about something that’s actually about secrecy. And who needs secrets?” Dalsgaard asked. “Typically, it’s people who don’t want the world to see what they’re doing.”
At the heart of the feud is the question of whether Bouvier’s “discretion” amounted to the deception of his client. In 2015, after Rybolovlev learned that Bouvier had pocketed $25 million on a Modigliani he had acquired for him, the oligarch accused his art dealer of fraud and money laundering, igniting an all-out legal war that would unfold across international jurisdictions.
Famously elusive, Rybolovlev does not appear on camera in the series, but his perspective on the events is expressed through interviews with his lawyer and his former financial director. According to the filmmakers, the inclusion of these figures who counterbalance Bouvier’s narrative enabled them to layer competing versions of events. “At one point, you think Bouvier is a crook, at another point you think he’s a very smart businessman. And even those ideas keep changing,” Dalsgaard said. “Our sympathies were constantly shifting… From a filmmaker’s perspective, the joy was asking, ‘How can we put the audience in that position? How can we play with that so that the audience’s sympathies also shift?’”
The series is informed by a wealth of fresh information revealed in recent court proceedings, especially the Russian oligarch’s lawsuit against Sotheby’s. Rybolovlev accused the auction house of conspiring with Bouvier by concealing his markups, although a U.S. federal jury ruled against his favor in 2024. In an art world governed by secrecy, the trial provided Jörg and Dalsgaard with a trove of material that enabled them to reconstruct a detailed timeline of the events and shape the series. “We got access to all those legal documents—emails, invoices, text messages, ten years of communication between these three entities [Rybolovlev, Bouvier and Sotheby’s]. That’s something you never get to see,” Dalsgaard said. “How are these deals made? How is the auction house operating in collusion or in collaboration with the art dealers? All of that is just here to see.” For the filmmakers, in addition to substantiating or refuting specific claims, these documents exposed the opaque mechanics that underlie the very top of the art market.
Revealing that machinery was critical to Jörg and Dalsgaard’s broader ambition. “You have to understand that you’re part of a billion-dollar game—even as an audience, you are part of that game, because you are the ones that they want to influence in order to affect public opinion,” Jörg said. “To reveal that game to the audience was a big part of the storytelling.” They hope that, instead of offering a final verdict, The Oligarch and the Art Dealer shows how the buying and selling of art is a vehicle within a much larger system of finance and power.
“It’s a world that resembles films like Tenet or series like Billions or Succession, but to see it in a documentary—that just doesn’t really happen,” Dalsgaard said. He and Jörg believe that encountering this world in documentary form will force viewers to recognize how art has been absorbed into systems of wealth management that remain largely unregulated and insulated from view. “When art becomes worth a hundred million dollars,” Dalsgaard asked, “is it an art piece or a financial instrument?”