Where artists go, money follows.
It is an ancient law of real estate that any quarter deemed bohemian is a step away from becoming intensely desirable and valuable. And so it is with Mougins, where the likes of Picabia, Cocteau, Man Ray and Leger used to visit. Picasso came here in 1936, and to the fury of his hotel’s owner painted on the walls of his room. He was instructed to cover over his work, but he returned, and by then not exactly skint himself, spent the last 12 years of his life in Mougins. He died there in 1973. Now this little hill town, of pre-Roman origins, with its simple, compact old buildings, wound tightly into defensive circuits of curving streets, finds itself suffused with wealth.
A few kilometers inland from Cannes, it offers more cultured pleasures than that sometimes tawdry place, while still gathering some of its stardust. Mougins has been popular with Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor and Catherine Deneuve, to name but a few. It is famous for its restaurants, and has an annual festival of gastronomy. It is packed with art galleries, not all at the same high level as its restaurants, showing variants on almost every imaginable genre, from picturesque landscapes to teeth-grating conceptual installations.
Photo: Bloomberg
On the town’s edge the five-star Le Mas Candille hotel spreads over green slopes toward an exceptional view. As liberal with space as the ancient buildings are thrifty, with a sophisticated restaurant, it is designed to serve the pleasures of a certain kind of international moneyed class.
Mougins is part of a landscape that attracted J.G. Ballard, where hardy peasant buildings, a fabulous climate, gorgeous light, beautiful scenery and modern leisure make a rich-poor, new-old, hybrid that is neither town nor country. Glossy four-by-fours hurtle round tiny lanes made for carts. Old agricultural buildings are remade as refined retail outlets. The forms of hard productive work coexist with hedonism. Now the union of money and art has bred a new, intriguing institution, the Mougins Museum of Classical Art.
This is the creation of Christian Levett, a 41-year-old investment manager whose company Clive Capital once lost US$400 million in a week, yet seemed to shrug off the loss as if it were a coin dropped in the gutter. Levett has said, as a simple statement of fact, that he was “financially very successful at a young age” and by his early 30s “had established several homes.” He is also an avid collector ever since, aged seven, he discovered an interest in coins. His greatest passion is now classical antiquities, which developed after he discovered, to his surprise, that it is still possible to buy them.
Photo: Bloomberg
Levett also has a strong connection with Mougins, where he owns two of the finest and most famous restaurants, La Place des Mougins and L’Amandier. Both have recently been revamped under the direction of the chef Denis Fetisson, previously at the Michelin two-star Le Cheval Blanc in Courchevel. Of the two, L’Amandier, a white-walled former almond mill with terraces commanding the view towards the perfume-making town of Grasse, is the more informal.
“It is a blessing for Mougins that he has fallen in love with it,” says a young local, adding that “he might own the whole village one day.” The result of this double passion, for antiquities and for the town, is the museum. Here the collection is now on show, the result of about seven years of collecting. The last three years were in collaboration with Mark Merrony, the director of the museum. Merrony is an archaeologist who became editor of the art and archaeology magazine Minerva, which Levett now owns. Merrony remains editor-in-chief of the magazine, but most of his energies have recently gone into the museum.
The collection includes bust and statues, such as the Cobham Hall Hadrian, bought at Christie’s for US$900,000 in 2008. There are vases, glassware, jewelry and coins, and an array described as the world’s “largest private collection of ancient armor,” including a helmet dented with a blow that was probably fatal to its wearer. There are some Egyptian busts, reliefs and coffins, and a small collection of erotica. There are also works by old masters and modern artists, such as Rubens, Degas, Rodin, Braque, Picasso and on to Mark Quinn, Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley. These are intended to show the continuity of classical themes into the present. “These themes have been in the human psyche for 2,500 years,” Merrony says. “That’s the hardest thing to understand about humanity: the psyche.”
The collection, 95 percent of which is on show, is packed into a plain medieval townhouse refurbished by the locally based architect David Price, with an installation by the exhibition designers Event. The exhibits are lit against a dark background, and closely spaced, with ranks of busts confronting you soon after entry. As the lift and stairs take up a quarter of the total floor area, they are used as exhibition spaces, too. The lift is of glass, so you can see exhibits when you are riding in it. The displays are lightly themed: the Egyptian objects are axially arranged in a tomb-like basement, while armor and erotica are given their own zones. Shifts in axis, due to the cranked shape of the old building, are handled, says Merrony, in the same way as shifts in the Roman-Syrian city of Palmyra, at a miniaturized scale. The modern works, meanwhile, interrupt the theming. They are dotted about the ancient objects to create contrasts and parallels that are striking but a touch gimmicky. A bright blue Yves Klein torso, for example, or a Hirst skull, suddenly appears.
The interior is like a pristine cave, in contrast with the rugged stone exterior, with pieces that sometimes seem too perfect to be true. As Merrony and Levett are well aware, the collecting of antiquities has been a fraught subject in recent decades, with institutions such as the Getty Museum being forced to give back objects of dubious origin. For this reason Merrony is very clear that establishing clear provenance and authenticity “is the most important thing.”
A personal collection made into a museum is a recurring theme in Western cities — the Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, the Frick in New York, the Soane and the Wallace Collection in London. The Mougins Museum is not quite equal to this august company, and does not pretend to be, but it still has the appeal of a private hoard made public: the individual taste of the collector, and the surprise at finding exceptional things in an unexpected place.
It is unusual to find a place of old-fashioned patronage newly minted.
The Mougins Museum is also an addition to the art trail along the Cote d’Azur, where artists’ discovery of the delights of the region has been honored by permanent structures. Where once Parisian painters and sculptors might have happened on a place as a spot for a weekend trip, or to rent a cheap studio for a few months, now there are museums and monuments. In Antibes there is the Picasso museum. In Vence is the Rosaire chapel, where every detail, from stained glass to water stoup to priest’s vestments, was designed by Matisse. Personally I find this work a little insipid and too pious, but I know Matisse-lovers who rave about it, and he himself said that he considered it his masterpiece. Further afield, on the edge of Nice, is the Matisse museum. In Mougins itself, arranged in a vertical series of rooms, is a little museum of photography, centered on a series of portraits of Picasso.
There is the Fondation Maeght at St Paul de Vence. Here is installed a collection of sculptures and paintings, by artists including Calder, Miro, Chagall and Giacometti (especially Giacometti). They stand amid pines on a high breezy spot with a 1964 building by the Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert. Sert’s building slips in among the trees, making courtyards and luminous galleries, and outdoor terraces where the art sits easily between buildings and nature. It is a plain structure, but made festive with a pink-brick and white-concrete color scheme, and sunshades in the shape of upside-down barrel vaults.
If your idea of rural France is plain peasant life expressed in buildings and cuisine — leaving aside how far this now exists anywhere — then Mougins and its surroundings are not for you. They are too much infiltrated by the values of Bond Street or of Rodeo Drive. It is rather a place where extraordinary beauty, in art, climate and nature, combines with ostentation and exploitation, and considerable skill in serving the senses, especially through food.
It can be enjoyed for those beauties and delights, while also exerting a certain Ballardian fascination for its extremes and incongruities. For better or worse, this is a part of what the modern world is.
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