The Levett Collection, owned by British former hedge-fund manager Christian Levett, holds some 1,700 works in all media, spanning from antiquities to contemporary art, and from which works are regularly loaned to exhibitions internationally. While Levett once held the world’s largest private collection of arms and armour, a third of the collection is now dedicated to female artists of the past 150 years. The former Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins, the museum Levett founded in 2011 in the South of France, reopened, following major refurbishment, in 2024 as the Femmes Artistes Musée Mougins (FAMM), a private museum that showcases approximately one hundred works at a time by women artists, from an Impressionist painting by Blanche Hoschedé-Monet from the 1890s to recent work by British artist Sarah Lucas. While additionally funding exhibitions across Europe, and publishing Abstract Expressionists: The Women (2023), Levett continues to position himself as an advocate and supporter of female artists.
ArtReview When did your passion for art begin?
Christian Levett I’ve always collected things fanatically since I was tiny, coins and military medals. On family holidays, wherever we went in the UK, we would visit local castles and cathedrals, so that gave me an interest in history. But we didn’t visit art galleries or art-specific museums, we visited historical museums and historical sites. When I moved to Paris in my twenties, I thought that was an opportunity to learn more about art. At that point I started visiting galleries, and then I started buying quite seriously and couldn’t really stop.
AR Do you have a favourite artist or artwork?
CL There are several really. I have a wooden Tuscan Renaissance bust of a boy, aged sixteen perhaps, a sculpture that dates to around 1500, and who looks like he’s wearing the clothes of someone who might have worked in an artist’s workshop of the period. It’s also, coincidentally, the spitting image of a self-portrait drawing by Raphael that’s in the Ashmolean Museum, wearing the same dress, with the same face and hair. On the painting side, Elaine de Kooning’s 1963 Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue is a four-metre-wide picture, a portrait of a group of guys who were in a drug reform centre on an island in the East River of New York. It’s intentionally arranged like an early-seventeenth-century Dutch family portrait, and the play on the name of the Rodin sculpture of a similar name adds another twist. De Kooning had also just been in the news at the time because she had sat with JFK to paint his portrait two months prior and said that she wanted to use the opportunity to paint a political picture herself. This seems to be that picture, to draw attention to mass drug addiction in New York among young people during the early 1960s.
Another of my favourites is a painting called Prophecy [1956] by Lee Krasner, the picture that she had just painted when Jackson Pollock died. It’s a painting of a mangled bloody figure, and she had said to Pollock words to the effect of, I’m painting this disturbing figure and it’s a new direction for me – probably meaning that it was the first time she painted something figurative rather than just totally abstract. He encouraged her to continue working on it then she went to Paris for a month. It was while she was away that he died in the car accident. Krasner returns to the us and there’s a famous photo of her in her studio after arriving back, and Prophecy is still on the easel beside her. It’s therefore seemingly named Prophecy because it is prophesying the car accident just before it happened. One might say it’s one of America’s most important pictures by a female artist. To have the privilege of owning that is clearly something incredibly special. It’s been in something like 60 museum shows and spends its life on almost continuous exhibition tour.
AR Do you feel like you have a personal connection to or keen interest in the story of many of the works in your collection?
CL Yes, I certainly like to buy works that have a particularly interesting provenance or story to them, as well as them being a great work of art of course. I’ve spent several years building what is arguably the most important collection of female abstract expressionism in the world. There was an extraordinary moment in time, after the Denver Museum of Art did a show of female abstract expressionism in 2016 and a short time later the book Ninth Street Women was released, both of which coincidentally spurred my interest. I’d already bought works by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, and was already looking at artists like Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning, and then I started looking at other major artists from the time, like Pat Passlof, Yvonne Thomas and Ethel Schwabacher. The affordability of all these artists versus their male counterparts, who were anything from ten to a hundred times the price, then led me down a rather fantastic path of both research, purchasing, exhibiting, curating and publishing in the female art arena that really changed my life in the arts forevermore.
AR You pivoted from what had been a long-standing interest in antiquities towards women artists working over the past 150 years. Was that a sudden shift?
CL It was more gradual than it appears. There was a pivotal moment when I divorced my first wife in 2013. As part of the divorce, she got the bulk of the Old Masters collection, which was basically irreplaceable. But I was also getting a little disillusioned by the antiquities market, and I just had this moment where I decided, ‘I’m not buying any more Old Masters or antiquities. I’m going to focus on modern from here on.’ I just wanted to buy great twentieth-century pictures by great artists and great examples of their work.
Then, after two or three years, I started to realise that you could buy the greatest female artists of the twentieth century and buy some of their greatest pictures, but by comparison you would pay ten times the price for a mediocre example by the male equivalent, if you could find one. Once I dived into the research, I became as addicted to buying female artworks as I had been to buying classical art 15 years earlier. I really enjoy building out and managing collections, I find that fun, fascinating and extremely exciting. So then it becomes a case of filling the gaps, right? Now I need that artist, and I need an A-plus example of her work.
I then moved to Florence in 2019, and it was just a great place for showing largescale abstract expressionist artwork, because of the eight-metre-high ceilings and how the colours merge exquisitely with the fresco ceilings. Right after lockdown I rehung my palazzo entirely with female abstract expressionists, and started giving house tours to museum patrons, collector groups and university classes, and I just started getting calls all the time. Then I published a book about abstract expressionism from a female perspective, and worked with Iwona Blazwick on a show at the Whitechapel Gallery, incorporating works from my collection with other global female abstractionists. So the shift to focus on female artists took several years, and there were several catalysts along the way.
AR What do you think art has to offer society?
CL It’s uplifting and educational. Museums were essential centres of education before schools became available for everyone in the late 1800s, and I still believe in that when I’m sponsoring exhibitions. The fact that there’s a huge historical and research element to a show or display is, I think, incredibly important for the public. Art is also a form of escape and entertainment. And art is totally universal: anyone can look at any kind of artefact or artwork and obtain something educational and inspirational from it. It offers a multitude of important things in one.
AR What do you think is the purpose of philanthropy in art today?
CL Since the [UK] government has reduced money going into the arts going back to 2008, museums have had to find ways to fill that revenue gap. The government had to control its deficit, so museums have needed to become far more efficient and more self-sustaining, which in many ways has been a good thing. As a result, museums have got better at finding revenue streams, and in particular in raising money from wealthy individuals. To the UK’s credit, museums are still free, which they’re not just about anywhere else in the world. As a philanthropist, though, you have to balance the money that you have going into the arts versus other things. I give money to children’s charities and research into diseases too for example. There’s certainly more urgent things out there than supporting an art exhibition, but I do believe that art exhibitions improve cultural and historical understanding and bring people together. Clearly, that’s critically important as well.
AR Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve structured your philanthropic activities in art and why you have maintained your work in a private collection rather than, say, creating a foundation?
CL I keep everything in my own name so that I can do with the collection what I personally want to do with it, and when. In France, for example, if I had turned my classical art museum into a foundation, I would have had to set up a board with a local government official on it, and then buying and selling things becomes a board decision. Doing a major renovation, selling parts of the collection and then bringing in a new collection, as a foundation, would probably not have happened. But as a personal decision, I could just execute it when I wanted to; I can have artworks moving in and out of the museum from my home, and in and out of storage, and everything I just sign off on myself. I retain complete control of the collection, which I like. Conversely, although we can charge an entrance fee, I can’t receive government funding in France, and I can’t accept donations from anyone else, so I personally pay for all the significant costs of running the museum myself, but I’m comfortable with that, because I have total flexibility to manage the collection how I like. Having said that, we need to improve our commercial revenue streams in the museum ourselves, as the costs of managing the collection overall have multiplied in recent years.
AR Could you describe in brief your philanthropic activities in art?
CL I’ve been a sponsor to more than 40 major museum exhibitions over the last 15 years, but I’m fairly random; I don’t have a fixed budget every year. The development departments of different museums call me for things they know that I would be interested in sponsoring. Last year, for example, I was one of the sponsors of the Roman army exhibition at the British Museum, and of the Angelica Kauffman, Florence and Ukrainian exhibitions at the Royal Academy. I sponsored the Now You See Us exhibition at Tate Britain – 400 years of female artists working in Britain; and I am a sponsor to the current Tracey Emin exhibition in the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, for example.
I’ve also sponsored archaeological digs in England, Italy, Egypt and Spain, digitisation projects at the Ashmolean, the British Museum and the British School of Rome, and building-refurbishment projects at the Ashmolean, the Soane museum, the RA, the Met and the London Charterhouse. If it’s a place that is doing something I think is interesting and relevant, then I have often been there to sponsor it, depending on how much I’ve already spent that year.
AR How do you make decisions about where to lend works?
CL We almost always lend works when we get a request for a loan. Most of the time we say yes unless it’s a key piece we want to keep in the FAMM museum, or unless the exhibition is small and they want a piece so valuable that it’s not really worth the risk of damage to it, but it’s actually pretty rare that we refuse a loan. However, we’re getting so many loan requests that sometimes we’re refusing loans because the picture’s already going somewhere else.
AR How do you see your activities as different from those of other collectors, and how do you see your activities developing in the long term?
CL There’s a reasonable number of collectors who do what I do, of course; who open private museums, sit on museum boards or open their houses to patron groups and/or sponsor shows. Although perhaps there’s not so many that do all of those, and in such a wide range of collecting areas, as I have. I’m also one of a handful of entities that are now focused solely on the global repositioning of female artists, and possibly own the world’s leading private collection of modern female art. I’m managing it on a small scale compared to the Arnaults or Pinaults of this world, of course, but we’re all basically art fanatics and super passionate about it. What’s been a hobby has now turned into a job too; in fact, I spend more time managing the collection than I do anything else these days.
My oldest son did a degree and a master’s in art history, and has worked in galleries and auction houses, and ultimately he’s the one who will take over the running of the collection, that’s the long-term intention. Meanwhile, the last few years I’ve been expanding the female collection into other areas, buying Surrealism, Impressionism, Postimpressionism, a little bit of contemporary, but I don’t really get involved too much in the emerging contemporary side. Following the sale of a large number of antiquities and works by male artists over the last two years, currently the Levett Collection contains about 1,700 artworks, although at one time it was nearly 3,000, so I have streamlined it a lot in recent years. The female artist component of that is around 600 pieces of mostly major oil paintings and sculpture, with over 100 in FAMM, which displays a history of female art from Impressionism to contemporary.
Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025, an exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid with the support of the Christian Levett Collection and FAMM, is on view at ICA London, 24 June – 7 September
ArtReview’s May issue is accompanied by a standalone publication on philanthropy in the arts, with essays exploring funding models in North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, profiles of four prominent philanthropists and a guide to philanthropic initiatives around the world. This publication was created with the support of the Christian Levett Collection
