Christian Levett on creating Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM): ‘I needed the collection to tell a story, and that story is the birth of modern art’

There may come a time when a museum devoted entirely to female artists will be redundant — as strange as a museum for right-handed artists. However, in a world where modern art by women still makes up only about 11 per cent of major museum acquisitions, and where their paintings still cost a fraction of what their male contemporaries can command, the newly opened Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM) is a vital addition to the canon.

Situated in the picturesque hilltop village of Mougins in the south of France, once home to Picasso and Francis Picabia, the privately owned FAMM is housed in a former museum of classical antiquity. More than 100 paintings and sculptures by more than 80 artists, spanning the period from 1870 to the present day, are closely spaced on four floors, creating an intimate atmosphere in which to see works by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Leonora Carrington, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Shirin Neshat and Carrie Mae Weems.

The driving force behind FAMM is 54-year-old investment manager Christian Levett, who has a home in Mougins and owns two restaurants in the town. A passionate collector of classical antiquities, he also began buying modern art 10 years ago and hasn’t looked back, filling his house in Florence with a stunning collection of modern and contemporary art by women.

Levett says the aim of the museum is not to insert these artists back into the canon, but to shift the indicators by which they are celebrated. Accordingly, the museum offers an international and refreshingly unconventional history of art.

One of the intentions of the museum is to broaden the public’s knowledge of certain artists who have, until recently, only been known for a small sample of their work — usually the paintings or sculptures they made as part of a wider movement or group. Artists such as Dorothea Tanning, who produced strange psychodramas in the 1930s while a sometime member of the Surrealists, but is represented here by a vast, shadowy abstract from 1962.

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo rejected the term ‘Surrealist’, arguing that she was never a member and did not paint her dreams but her own reality. FAMM shines a light on her life with a plaster corset, worn after a bus crash, on which she painted an unborn baby and the communist hammer and sickle.

Dora Maar complained that she was too famous as Picasso’s mistress to be accepted as a painter. She is well regarded as a photographer, but FAMM holds an extraordinary Cubist portrait from 1937 that reveals a great talent.

There are works by artists who were respected in their lifetimes but have since been written out of the history books: artists such as the Impressionist painter Eva Gonzalès, and the Post-Impressionists Jacqueline Marval and Marie Laurencin. There are also the ‘wives’: painters who were eclipsed by their spouses, such as Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Lalan, Dorothy Dehner and Françoise Gilot, to name a few.

On the eve of the opening of the museum, Levett spoke to Christie’s about its origins.

Your first collection was in classical antiquities. What made you decide to collect modern and contemporary art by women instead?

Christian Levett: I decided to focus on collecting modern art about 10 years ago. Initially I was buying both male and female artists. I just wanted fantastic works by major artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, which includes Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Cecily Brown and Tracey Emin.

I came across the catalogue for Elaine de Kooning’s show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in 2016 and thought, this is interesting, and it made me wonder if there were other female abstract painters from that era out there. I found all these amazing paintings by major female artists who had been shown by Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons in the 1940s and 1950s, and exhibited at MoMA in New York.

If the paintings had been by male artists, they would have been financially unobtainable, but instead I found I could buy a work by Grace Hartigan or Elaine de Kooning for $300,000. I realised I could recreate a museum show from the 1950s from what was on the market for not that much money. So I thought, OK, let’s put together a museum-quality collection.

Is that how the 2023 exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London came about?

CL: It all came about because I own Lee Krasner’s most important work, Prophecy (1956), which I loaned to the Barbican Art Gallery in 2019. Krasner was working on it during the breakdown of her marriage to Jackson Pollock. The painting disturbed her, but Pollock encouraged her to keep going with it. Later that year, while she was in France, he died in a car accident. She completed the painting on her return to the US.

Through the Barbican, I learned that the Whitechapel Art Gallery had wanted to stage the 2016 Denver Art Museum touring show, Women of Abstract Expressionism, but they couldn’t get the funding to bring the works across the Atlantic.

So I emailed Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick and sent her a PDF of more than 100 Abstract Expressionist artworks I have in my collection, and I asked if she would be interested in doing a show. Five minutes later, she called saying, ‘Do you own all these paintings?’ And that she had wanted to do a show for five years, and would I sponsor the logistics of an exhibition? I said yes, and it was arranged on the spot, with 45 of my paintings going into the exhibition.

The opening was packed, it was the biggest turnout in years. At the same time, I was conducting tours of my female artist collection in my home in Florence, and I had more interest than I could cope with. So I thought: this needs a museum.

And that is how FAMM was conceived?

CL: Pretty much. I owned the Mougins Museum of Classical Art (known as MACM, from the French version of its name, the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins), which had been struggling to gain extra traction and perhaps needed a change. With the private tours of my house in Florence going so well and so many works going out on loan, and the female art collection overall gaining so much attention — and also having published a book about my Abstract Expressionism collection — I decided that it made sense to change the museum in Mougins to one dedicated to female art. And so this has all come about in the past 18 months, really.

Were people supportive of your new direction?

CL: The mayor of Mougins, Richard Galy, used to describe the MACM as ‘Le petit Louvre’, so when I told him my idea he started to cry. But the mayor knows a lot about art, and once we chatted and I’d explained my idea, he came onboard. It was harder for those in the office, because they had to switch from being classicists to experts on modern art, which was a huge shock. They’ve done a remarkable job, and hopefully the rest of the world likes it too.

Did you ever think of opening the museum in London?

CL: When I planned the MACM, I thought it might look a bit odd in London, whereas Mougins was in the heart of the old Roman empire, and a lot of the towns down here were Greek trading cities originally, so it made sense. I had no experience of speaking to the art press — I thought they might wonder who this fund manager was. With the benefit of hindsight, I think the press would have taken it really well, but at the time I had no experience of speaking to them. It will be interesting to see how people take to a female artist museum here. It’s a bit of a test, but so far the response has been amazingly positive.

Why did you decide on the timeframe of 1870 to the present?

CL: I needed the collection to be cohesive and tell a story, and that story is the birth of modern art. If you start going back to Old Masters, it opens up a whole can of worms. I didn’t want to throw in a Lavinia Fontana from 1590 or a 17th-century Dutch female painter — it starts getting a bit all over the place, and it would have taken considerable time to put together a 500-year chronology.

There are many female artists who have been overlooked in history. Can you highlight a few in your collection that should be better known?

CL: I’m interested to see how the public responds to Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, because she painted beautiful pictures. She was Monet’s stepdaughter and eventually married his son, Jean. She painted by Monet’s side for years and was clearly an apprentice of his. There is a painting we have in the collection titled La Moisson (Les Moyettes), a depiction of wheat sheaves dated 1885. Monet painted his haystacks in 1890… Did she give him the idea?

In a similar fashion, there’s Janet Sobel, the artist some people think Jackson Pollock copied. She was making drip paintings on her kitchen table two years before he did. She had an exhibition in 1944 in New York, which we know Pollock went to see. So he may well have got the idea of lying the canvas flat and dripping on it from her.

I also think the post-Impressionist artist Jacqueline Marval is amazing and completely undervalued. She was highly respected in her lifetime. There was a 2023-24 show at the Petit Palais, Le Paris de la modernité: 1905-1925 representing the greatest artists of Paris, and it included four paintings by Marval. She worked alongside Matisse and the Nabis artists, but you can buy her work today for around £60,000 to £100,000.

Finally, Dorothy Dehner’s sculpture is amazing, but you can pick up her bronzes for about $40,000 to $60,000 at auction. She was David Smith’s wife. There are quite a lot of artists in the collection who were married to other artists, and there’s a misconception that a lot of them were following their husbands. The reality is that male and female artists were often showing at the same galleries, going to the same restaurants and bars, and speaking to the same curators and gallerists, so they were in the same circles. Inevitably, some of them ended up marrying each other. Unfortunately, certain artists became better-known as the wives of their famous husbands. There’s a great picture in the museum by Lalan, for instance, who was married to Zao Wou-Ki — her paintings are incredibly difficult to source, because they are so rare.

Do you do most of the research yourself?

CL: My team and I do a lot of it. I find Impressionism and post-Impressionism super-interesting. There’s quite a lot on Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, but not much on Lilla Cabot Perry or Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange, who was married to Paul Signac. It’s not easy: I don’t think there’s a single quote out there by Eva Gonzalès, not one, even though she painted with Manet and was one of his favourite muses.

We need online catalogue raisonnés on these artists, particularly as interest grows, to avoid misattribution and fakes. People perk up when something trades expensively at auction, and it can lead to all sorts of problems. Currently, all we have are little bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that we are trying to put together. It makes it very tricky. Fortunately, there are lots of students out there doing their dissertations on female artists, so the information will eventually become available.

What’s the current puzzle you are grappling with?

CL: Well, I guess the artist Marie Raymond is a good example of what I mean. She was Yves Klein’s mother and we have a painting by her in the collection from 1961 which is painted with Yves Klein Blue. So the question is: Who did it first? Mother or son?

Is there an artist who got away from you?

CL: Yes, the Spanish Surrealist painter Remedios Varo. It’s very hard to buy a work by her: she’s been popular for a few years now. It is a shame, because I’ve got many of the other female Surrealists, such as Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington and Jane Graverol, and I have one of the largest collections of paintings by Leonor Fini.

How diverse is the collection, and is diversity a consideration?

CL: It’s pretty easy to be diverse, because there are lot of great non-white, non-Western artists out there, but we don’t do it consciously. We have artists from Africa and its diaspora: Carrie Mae Weems, Stacey Gillian Abe, Elizabeth Colomba, Delphine Diallo, Alma Thomas, Howardena Pindell, Sylvia Snowden, to name a few. A relatively recent acquisition is a photograph by Shirin Neshat. It’s harder to find Asian artists, and I’ve had to study them a bit more closely: currently we have Linjing Peng, Lalan and Li Fang. The most important thing is that it’s a great work of art — if that’s your criterion, you should by default end up with a very diverse collection.

You must be inundated with people offering you artworks. How do you sift through them all?

CL: My main email address and my WhatsApp are jammed. I get through most of it, and I try to tell people only to send me stuff that is really special. I do seem to catch it when it pops up, though, whether it’s a 1953 Françoise Gilot painting or the 1937 Dora Maar — even on WhatsApp, the best pieces shine through.

Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM) is now open at 32 rue Commandeur, 06250 Mougins, France