In a medieval village, Mougins, on a hill near Cannes, once claimed by Picasso, a quiet revolution is rewriting art history one canvas at a time. Female Artists of the Mougins Museum (FAMM), Europe’s first private fine-art museum dedicated exclusively to women artists, is not merely a collection — it is a long-overdue correction, and one of the most compelling reasons to climb the hill to Mougins.
A gallery at the Female Artists of the Mougins Museum. Photograph: FAMM/Jerome KelagopianYou can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
We are grateful!
Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
We are grateful!
Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
There is a particular quality to rain in Provence that the tourist brochures never mention. It arrives as mood, not weather: a grey curtain drawn across the hills above Cannes, softening the cypresses and the limestone, making the medieval streets of Mougins glisten like something recently remembered. It was on such an afternoon, in October, that I climbed the narrow road to the village and found, in the stillness of a nearly empty museum, a quiet revolution hanging on the walls.
FAMM (the Female Artists of the Mougins Museum) opened its doors in June 2024, and in doing so became the first private fine-art museum in Europe dedicated exclusively to the work of women artists. It occupies the same four-storey building in the heart of the old village that once housed the Mougins Museum of Classic Art, founded in 2011 by Christian Levett, a British former investment manager whose collecting habit had grown, over three decades, into something closer to a vocation. The transformation was more than cosmetic. Where Roman busts and Hellenistic bronzes once stood in pedagogical dialogue with modern canvases, over a hundred works by some eighty to ninety women now command the rooms alone: from the soft-focused domesticity of Berthe Morisot to the visceral figuration of Jenny Saville, from Frida Kahlo’s symbolic theatre of pain to the neon confessionals of Tracey Emin.
Levett has said that the impetus for the change came from a question so plain it was almost embarrassing. Rereading an art history survey, one of those canonical doorstops that furnish the coffee tables of the culturally aspirational, he reached the final page and wondered aloud: where are the women? The question is not new. The Guerrilla Girls asked a version of it in their 1989 poster demanding to know whether women had to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But there is a difference between asking a question on a billboard and answering it with a building. Levett’s wider collection now numbers some six hundred works by women, rotated through the museum’s galleries to ensure the exhibition is never quite the same twice, a curatorial strategy that mirrors the restless, unfinished nature of the feminist reclamation project itself.
The ground floor belongs to the Impressionists: Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzaèls. These were painters who exhibited alongside Renoir and Degas, who were praised in their lifetimes and then steadily airbrushed from the record. Morisot, a founding member of the Impressionist circle, showed at seven of the group’s eight exhibitions, yet for decades art history treated her as a footnote, a charming peripheral figure rather than a structural participant. To see her work here, in a room of its own, is to witness a restoration: the return of something that was always present but conveniently unseen.
Upstairs, the temperature changes. The Surrealists — Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning — inhabit a gallery of dreams that feel less like escape than like argument. These were women who lived inside one of the twentieth century’s most self-mythologising movements and refused to be reduced to muses. Carrington, who fled England for France in 1937 only to be separated from her lover Max Ernst by the war, suffered a breakdown in Spain and eventually found refuge in Mexico, where she spent the rest of her life painting bestial allegories that owed nothing to the male Surrealists’ obsession with the eroticised unconscious. Fini, imperious and deliberately theatrical, made canvases in which women were sovereign, architects of their own strange kingdoms. Kahlo’s presence here is almost expected — she has become, through decades of posthumous fame, a kind of secular saint of artistic suffering — but seeing her alongside these less celebrated contemporaries restores her to a context that biography alone cannot provide.
It is the abstraction gallery, though, that arrested me longest. Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Alma Thomas, artists whose formal achievements were routinely diminished by a critical establishment that could not quite believe a woman might arrive at colour-field painting through intellect rather than intuition. Frankenthaler herself resisted the gendered frame with characteristic directness: asked how she felt about being a woman painter, she replied that she was involved in painting, not the who and the how, and that looking at her work as if it were by a woman was superficial, a side issue. The canvases here are large, confident, and unapologetic. They do not ask for admiration; they assume it.
Mougins itself is no stranger to the mythology of art. Picasso spent the last twelve years of his life in a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, painting with the furious productivity of a man outrunning his own death. Fernand Léger worked nearby. Coco Chanel and Paul Éluard passed through. The village has dined out on this heritage for decades, and the irony is hard to miss: its most significant cultural institution is now dedicated to artists whom that same heritage habitually overlooked. The medieval stone walls, the winding alleys, the views towards the sea — all the apparatus of Provençal charm — now serve a different narrative, one in which genius is not the exclusive property of men who smoked and argued in cafés.
On the October afternoon I visited, the rain kept the crowds away. I moved through the galleries almost alone, accompanied only by the occasional murmur of a guard’s radio and the sound of water on old stone. Silence changes how you receive a painting. Without the jostle of the guided tour or the raised screens of a hundred phones, the works spoke with a clarity that felt almost conspiratorial, as though they had been waiting for exactly this: the particular attention that comes when the noise of the world recedes. I stood for a long time in front of a Frankenthaler, watching the colour move. The rain went on outside. Nobody came in.
Subscribe to our newsletter here and support independent journalism.
Join 12,000+ readers who receive it every Wednesday, with exclusive content. For just €5,99
✦✦✦
If you have a tip and wish to contact us securely, you can write to [email protected], our encrypted email address. We take the protection of our sources seriously and guarantee strict confidentiality.
✦✦✦
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know.
✦✦✦
You can listen to our podcast Queer News & Journalism on your favourite platform or go to our YouTube Channel @GAY45mag.
✦✦✦
Let us know what you think at [email protected].
✦✦✦
Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].
✦✦✦
We appreciate it. Thanks for reading.
