The story
Since June 2024, every artist on the walls of this narrow four-storey house in the hilltop village of Mougins, above Cannes, has been a woman. It is now the Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, known as FAMM, and the building has had several lives before, as the village prison in the Middle Ages, then a mill and a private home.
Its owner, the British collector Christian Levett, first opened it in 2011 as the Mougins Museum of Classical Art. Greek, Roman and Egyptian sculpture, coins and one of the largest private collections of ancient arms and armour stood there beside Picasso, Warhol and Dalí, arranged to show modern artists answering antiquity. That museum closed at the end of August 2023, and Levett reopened the rooms the following summer around the collection of women artists he had been building.
About 100 works are on show at a time, drawn from a much larger holding, and the hang runs from Impressionism to the present. Berthe Morisot is represented by a young woman stretched out on a sofa, painted in 1893, with Mary Cassatt nearby. Further on come Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, the Abstract Expressionists Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, and contemporary artists including Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin.
