Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The best thing about owning your own museum is \u201cwalking around it with no one knowing who you are, listening to what people say when they\u2019re looking at the art\u201d. 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 \u2014 much of it is being sold at Christie\u2019s \u2014 and Levett has reopened his museum with paintings and sculptures made exclusively by women. The aim is to present \u201ca history of female art\u201d from Impressionism to contemporary, Levett says on a Zoom call from Mougins. Why the shift in his museum\u2019s focus? Although the market for antiquities has become polarised in recent years \u2014 \u201cThings with great provenance have exploded in value, while objects with weak provenance are almost unsaleable,\u201d Levett says \u2014 the overriding factor has been his parallel enthusiasm for postwar art. In 2013, with his antiquities museum up and running, he \u201cdecided to focus on Modern and contemporary art. I wanted to buy fantastic works by the greatest artists, be they male or female.\u201d 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 \u201cmuseum-quality collection\u201d of work by female artists because \u201cthe very best works by women\u201d still come up for sale at a fraction of the price of art made by men. A case in point is Lee Krasner\u2019s \u201cProphecy\u201d (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\u2019s 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\u2019s 2019 Krasner show in London. For Levett, it is \u201cone of America\u2019s most important postwar paintings\u201d. Yet it has never found its way into the permanent collection of any American museum. Instead, in 2019 it was bought by Levett for \u201cover $5mn\u201d in a private sale arranged by Sotheby\u2019s.Krasner and her female contemporaries \u201cshowed at the same galleries\u201d as their male counterparts and \u201calso exhibited and sold to the major museums\u201d, Levett wrote in the preface to a catalogue of his Abstract Expressionist collection published last year. The \u201cspectacular colours, fantastic composition\u201d and \u201cexciting and gestural brushwork\u201d of their work made them \u201csome of the greatest artists of the period\u201d.Yet the men became \u201cinfinitely more famous\u201d, while the women were largely excluded from art history. \u201cIrving 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.\u201dIn 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\u2019s four floors, starting with Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzal\u00e8s and Blanche Hosched\u00e9 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\u2019s great museums \u201cto educate myself in art history\u201d.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 Le\u00f3n y Escosura. Today, he sponsors numerous exhibitions, including the British Museum\u2019s Legion: Life in the Roman Army and Tate Britain\u2019s 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 \u20ac1mn a year to run and, in its previous incarnation, lost \u20ac600,000 annually. \u201cFootfall 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.\u201d This is why \u201cit\u2019s important that I\u2019m buying great works of art of inherent value that people want to see.\u201d 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? \u201cI want everyone from the expert art curator to the inquisitive impromptu tourist to say to themselves, \u2018This is absolutely incredible, how is it possible that I\u2019ve barely seen a female artwork in a museum before?\u2019 If visitors do that then perhaps I\u2019ll have made a contribution to correcting the imbalance.\u201dfamm.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The best thing about owning your own museum is \u201cwalking around it with no one knowing who you are, listening to what people say when they\u2019re<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-136134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136135,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136134\/revisions\/136135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}