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The best thing about owning your own museum is “walking around it with no one knowing who you are, listening to what people say when they’re looking at the art”. So says Christian Levett, a British former hedge fund manager who put his collection of antiquities on public show in a converted medieval building in Mougins in the South of France in 2011.
Now the Egyptian, Greek and Roman art has come off display — much of it is being sold at Christie’s — and Levett has reopened his museum with paintings and sculptures made exclusively by women. The aim is to present “a history of female art” from Impressionism to contemporary, Levett says on a Zoom call from Mougins.
Why the shift in his museum’s focus? Although the market for antiquities has become polarised in recent years — “Things with great provenance have exploded in value, while objects with weak provenance are almost unsaleable,” Levett says — the overriding factor has been his parallel enthusiasm for postwar art. In 2013, with his antiquities museum up and running, he “decided to focus on Modern and contemporary art. I wanted to buy fantastic works by the greatest artists, be they male or female.” His purchases included pieces by Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Cecily Brown and Tracey Emin, which he initially installed in the Florentine palazzo where he now lives.
Levett, 54, soon came to realise that it was possible to put together a “museum-quality collection” of work by female artists because “the very best works by women” still come up for sale at a fraction of the price of art made by men. A case in point is Lee Krasner’s “Prophecy” (1956), a painting of violently deconstructed, fleshy female forms that the artist worked on weeks before the death of her husband, Jackson Pollock, in a car crash.
The canvas, which heralds a new direction in the painter’s work, has been widely published and exhibited in the US and Europe, including in a 1983 Krasner retrospective that toured North America and the Barbican’s 2019 Krasner show in London. For Levett, it is “one of America’s most important postwar paintings”. Yet it has never found its way into the permanent collection of any American museum. Instead, in 2019 it was bought by Levett for “over $5mn” in a private sale arranged by Sotheby’s.
Krasner and her female contemporaries “showed at the same galleries” as their male counterparts and “also exhibited and sold to the major museums”, Levett wrote in the preface to a catalogue of his Abstract Expressionist collection published last year. The “spectacular colours, fantastic composition” and “exciting and gestural brushwork” of their work made them “some of the greatest artists of the period”.
Yet the men became “infinitely more famous”, while the women were largely excluded from art history. “Irving Sandler, a major art writer, published The Triumph of American Painting, his history of AbEx, in 1970. There are over 200 illustrations and colour plates and yet not one shows a painting by a female artist; they were simply left out.”
In recent years, the tide has slowly turned, with museums now keen to show female artists, both historic and contemporary, and more scholarly attention focused on them than ever before. He is hoping that his museum, the first in Europe to focus exclusively on women artists, will contribute to redressing the balance.
This corrective art history will unfold over the building’s four floors, starting with Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès and Blanche Hoschedé Monet, who often painted en plein air alongside her stepfather, Claude Monet. There will be sections on Surrealism, including works by the British-Mexican painter Leonora Carrington and the American Dorothea Tanning; figuration and abstraction, encompassing AbEx; and contemporary art.
As a child growing up in Southend-on-Sea on the east coast of England, Levett visited cathedrals, castles and historical museums around Britain on family holidays. When he moved to Paris, aged 25, to work for an American hedge fund, he spent every weekend in the city’s great museums “to educate myself in art history”.
It was in Paris that he made his first art purchases too: a 17th-century Delft scene by Egbert van der Poel and a 19th-century painting of a cavalier by the Spanish artist Ignacio de León y Escosura. Today, he sponsors numerous exhibitions, including the British Museum’s Legion: Life in the Roman Army and Tate Britain’s Now You See Us, with four centuries of female artists, and he sits on the board of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
The museum in Mougins costs Levett around €1mn a year to run and, in its previous incarnation, lost €600,000 annually. “Footfall would need to rise from just under 20,000 per year to around 80,000 to break even. So while I expect the new museum to grow significantly in visitors, it will still be expensive to run.” This is why “it’s important that I’m buying great works of art of inherent value that people want to see.” He is conscious there may be profit here too: he says he expects his holdings to appreciate significantly in value.
So what does Levett hope to overhear from visitors to his newly installed museum when he wanders round incognito? “I want everyone from the expert art curator to the inquisitive impromptu tourist to say to themselves, ‘This is absolutely incredible, how is it possible that I’ve barely seen a female artwork in a museum before?’ If visitors do that then perhaps I’ll have made a contribution to correcting the imbalance.”