Why Christian Levett is selling a museum-full of art
The British collector says he is ending one ‘period of fanaticism’ and beginning another. Having closed his award-winning Mougins Museum of Classical Art, he is offering much of its contents — from marble busts and Roman helmets to works by Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol — across six sales at Christie’s
‘The time has now come, though, to move on,’ he says. ‘I’m sad to be saying goodbye [to MACM], but it was an incredible pleasure to have something so special — and its closure will offer others an incredible opportunity of their own.’
In the meantime — across six sales at Christie’s, jointly known as A Collecting Odyssey: Property from the Mougins Museum of Classical Art — Levett will be offering the pick of the collection he showed at MACM. ‘It would be a pity to have so many fine pieces languishing in storage,’ he says. ‘In the same way that I once shared these pieces with the public by displaying them in the museum, I now want to share them with collectors or institutions at auction.’
Christian Levett at the Mougins Museum of Classic Art, whose closure, he says, ‘will offer others an incredible opportunity of their own’
The name of the original museum only tells part of its story. The exhibits didn’t consist solely of classical antiquities, but also of artworks from recent centuries showing a classical inspiration. MACM received as much praise for the way it juxtaposed pieces from different ages as it did for the pieces themselves.
Classical and Egyptian vases, coins, sculptures and jewellery could be viewed alongside works by the likes of Rubens, Rodin, Picasso and Warhol. ‘Ancient meets modern’ were Levett’s watchwords, and the approach brought him critical and popular acclaim. MACM was named Apollo magazine’s ‘New Museum of the Year’ in 2011, and it ended up welcoming a quarter of a million visitors. (To put that figure in context, the population of Mougins is just 19,000.)
‘I think people enjoyed seeing pieces talk to each other across millennia,’ says Levett. ‘The museum was a jigsaw puzzle of connections. It never ceases to impress me just how many artists from the Renaissance onwards created works with classical themes.’
One such artist is Damien Hirst, whose arresting sculpture, The Severed Head of Medusa (2013), is being offered on 7 December 2023 in Ancient to Modern Art from the Mougins Museum of Classical Art, Part I, which kicks off the suite of sales spanning London and New York. Executed in gold and silver, it depicts the snake-haired head of the Greek mythological monster, Medusa. She’s caught in an expression of eternal fury, shortly after her decapitation by the hero Perseus. Her mouth is wide open, and there’s a gaping hole where her right cheek should be. No longer will a look from her turn any man to stone.
Being offered in the same sale is a head of a different kind: a marble portrait from the 1st century A.D. of the Roman Emperor Augustus. He is portrayed with a rounded face, pursed, bow-shaped lips, and hair composed of a mass of comma-shaped locks. The piece was unearthed in France in the 1880s and would originally have been intended to glorify Augustus at a time when Gaul was part of the Roman empire.
Another stunning piece from the sale is a marble portrait bust of the later Roman Emperor Lucius Verus. In a conspicuous play of light and shadow, the 2nd century A.D. ruler is depicted with thick hair, which rises vertically from his head and falls from his beard in luxurious, haphazard curls.
Levett was born in the English town of Southend-on-Sea in 1970. His father had served in the army against Communist forces in the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s. Seeing his medals, and hearing his tales, generated in young Christian an interest in all things military. This also manifested itself in a love of making Airfix models of fighter planes and watching war movies.
‘When a shop opened near our house selling medals, that’s where I’d spend my pocket money,’ says Levett. He was only seven or eight years old at the time, and already his collecting journey had begun.
‘That was my artistic education,’ he says. ‘I also started reading art books around then, before deciding I wanted to collect some works of my own.’ Levett duly began buying Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and modern drawings, as well as hand-painted natural history books.
After he moved to London in 2002, the focus of his collecting shifted again, and he entered what he calls his ‘next period of fanaticism’. Purely out of curiosity, he ticked the box marked ‘Antiquities’ one day on an auction-house catalogue-request form — and soon found himself diving headlong into the ancient world.
He began to buy avidly from galleries and at auctions. One of the standout works he acquired was a Roman marble group sculpture of Bacchus, a satyr, Pan and Cupid. The main players in this dynamic, joyful scene are the young god Bacchus, who smilingly holds a bunch of grapes in one hand and a cornucopia in the other, and a good-natured satyr, who carries him on his shoulders.
The deity was associated with winemaking and pleasure, and his revelrous spirit infuses two of the modern works being offered at Christie’s: Bacchanale (1964), a gouache by Marc Chagall; and Scène bacchique au minotaure, a 1933 etching by Picasso.
In time, Levett’s fondness for classical antiquity extended to collecting art of recent times with a classical inspiration. He ended up with more than enough pieces to fill a museum (MACM would display 800 works across four floors).
It’s important to stress, however, that Levett’s collection of antiquities comprised more than artworks. In keeping with his boyhood love of military history, he acquired so many helmets, breastplates, backplates and swords that they eventually amounted to the world’s largest private collection of ancient arms and armour.
The highlights occupied MACM’s entire top floor, notwithstanding the fact that pieces were regularly lent to other institutions — a notable example being the Guttmann Mouse Helmet, which was loaned for five years to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (where Levett is a member of the visiting committee for arms and armour).
This exceptionally well-preserved iron helmet with copper-alloy adjuncts bears an inscription on the neck-guard naming its owner: an infantry officer called Julius Mansuetus. The back of the dome — in a highly unusual, perhaps devotional motif — is decorated with two small mice, each pursuing what appears to be a loaf of bread.
The helmet takes its name, incidentally, from its previous owner, Axel Guttmann, a German industrialist whose famed collection of ancient arms and armour was sold off through several auctions following his death in 2002 (with a significant number of his pieces ending up at MACM).
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