Europe’s ‘first museum dedicated to art by women artists’ to open in southern France

Former commodities dealer Christian Levett has introduced plans to transform his antiquities museum within the south of France into “the primary museum in Europe devoted to artwork by girls artists”. In keeping with a publish on Instagram, Levett’s Mougins Museum of Classical Artwork will shut on the finish of this month and reopen with its new focus in June subsequent 12 months.

“Christian Levett, the founder and proprietor of the Mougins Museum of Classical Artwork, is to provide the museum an entire facelift, closing it as a classical artwork museum on 31 August 2023, and reopening [it] as an exhibition museum in spring 2024, displaying rotating reveals of Trendy and modern artwork,” says a press release on the museum web site.

The museum will likely be rebranded because the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins.

In an Instagram publish, Levett says works by artists drawn from his assortment comparable to Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Howardena Pindell, Cecily Brown and Nancy Graves will go on present within the refurbished venue.

In an interview within the Monetary Instances in 2018, Levett estimated that he had made greater than 3,000 purchases over 25 years, constructing initially a group of classical antiquities—one of many largest in personal arms—and modern artwork which incorporates works by artists comparable to Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn. In keeping with his web site, nearly 250,000 individuals have visited his museum in Mougins because it opened in 2011.

In keeping with the Sunday Instances Wealthy Checklist 2020, as of that 12 months Levett was price £222m. “The primary image that I purchased in Paris was in 1995—a portray of a fireplace scene in Delft, created within the 1600s by a Dutch artist referred to as Egbert van de Poele; I paid 100,000 French francs for it. It type of went on from there,” Levett instructed The Sunday Instances.

His gathering technique modified in the course of the pandemic, nevertheless. “Throughout lockdown I began to construct a feminine Summary Expressionism assortment. I researched artists of that interval, even the lesser identified ones. Many works, which have additionally been exhibited within the museums, had been obtainable in the marketplace [via] public sale homes [and] different collections, and I began to place them again collectively,” Levett instructed Lampoon journal.

He hoovered up works by Twentieth-century girls artists, subsequently loaning quite a few work to the Whitechapel Gallery in London for its current exhibition Motion, Gesture, Paint: Girls Artists and International Abstraction 1940-1970, which is at present on the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles (till 22 October).

Levett can also be sponsoring an exhibition of works by the UK artists Flora Yukhnovich and Daniel Crews-Chubb on the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (till 14 January 2024). Levett wrote on Instagram: “Extremely blissful for Daniel whose profession we nurtured at [Vigo Gallery in London] after I was the financing accomplice there from 2012-2018.”

Levett additionally has a home in Florence, Italy, which, based on Lampoon journal, contains “two flooring stuffed with artistic endeavors, primarily by British or American painters. A attribute facet of this assortment is that each portray in Levett’s Florentine house is by a feminine artist.”