The Recent Story of Art without Men

It's a bestseller: Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men. And if you've read her 2022 book rewriting art history, or even if you haven't, you can go beyond the printed page and see the real thing close up for yourself, in Europe's only art museum without men. It's in the south of France, in a hilltop village just outside Cannes: Femmes Artistes Musée Mougins. 

Now in an ideal world, you shouldn't really need a museum in 2025 devoted solely to women artists. But this is clearly not an ideal world. As Hessel and many others have pointed out, women have historically been woefully underrepresented both in traditional museums and galleries and on the commercial art market. This women-only space (on the walls, we hasten to add; male visitors very welcome) aims to go some way to restore the balance. Did we like what we saw? Most definitely.

The museum, which opened last year, displays a rotating selection from the hundreds of works by women artists collected by former investment manager Christian Levett. "FAMM aims to restore women artists to the position they rightfully deserve in art history," he's quoted as saying. Of course, as any successful investor would testify, the trick is to discover and buy underpriced assets before anyone else. And artworks made by women are distinctly cheaper than those created by men. 

The FAMM collection doesn't tell the full history of women artists -- it doesn't go back as far as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, or Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Your tour of 100 or so works starts with the Impressionists: Think Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot (though when we were there, the Morisots were on loan to an exhibition elsewhere). But to concentrate on these big names would be wrong -- visiting this museum is to a large extent about making new discoveries, unearthing the unfamiliar, such as Lilla Cabot Perry. 

"I spent 10 summers painting in Giverny and had very warm friends in Monet and Pissarro who were interested in my work," the free museum booklet of the artists' words that you can read as you go round quotes the American as saying, and you could certainly imagine being on a slightly breezy balcony somewhere near Giverny as you look at this picture. "When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you," she said. "Paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you."

Look at this next painting and your first thought is of Amedeo Modigliani with those almond-shaped eyes. Try as you might, you can't write the story of art without men completely without men. This painting is by Modigliani's model, muse, lover, companion -- you choose your preferred word -- Jeanne Hébuterne. 

The subject is their fellow artist, Chaïm Soutine. Modigliani painted Soutine several times, but it has to be said that Hébuterne's view of Soutine seems to have rather more life in it than Modigliani's version in Washington's National Gallery, for example. 

Surrealism was a rather male-dominated art movement (weren't they all?), but this collection has a strong showing from female Surrealists, such as the Argentinian-Italian Leonor Fini. 

This is The Train, and not too far in the depths of our subconscious, it dredged up the question of whether Fini had ever heard of Augustus Egg, because this particular compartment and its occupants seem to owe a debt to Birmingham Art Gallery's The Travelling Companions, which Egg painted in 1862.

And here's another painting that brings up associations -- rather sad memories in this case. For many people in Britain, Jane Graverol's tree below, painted in 1959, will look remarkably similar to the one at Sycamore Gap along Hadrian's Wall that was illegally cut down in 2023. Such a striking image for us, whatever the artist originally intended. 

In case you're wondering about the oval shape floating in the sky, Graverol did include eggs in some of her other Surrealist works.

Just across the room, you can find a small but enigmatic sculpture by Leonora Carrington, an artist whose stock is very much on the rise at the moment. This Ship of Cranes, we're told, embodies her interpretation of the Mayan belief that every human has a unique animal companion or guide. Are they on a spiritual journey? Leonora would, no doubt, have told us not to overinterpret any of her work.   

FAMM has a lot of art crammed into quite a small space. Step back too far to try to get a broader look at a painting and you're in danger of setting off an alarm as you get too close to the picture on the opposite wall. It was pretty empty in there when we visited on a rainy weekday, but goodness knows what it's like in high season.  

And some works, like the one below, are hung on the staircase behind the lift linking the four floors, making them quite difficult to photograph. Oggetto ottico-dinamico (that's Optical-Dynamic Object) by Dadamaino is made of aluminium plates on nylon threads on a wooden structure, and it's hard to capture the sense of just how three-dimensional this work appears. It's actually flat, level with the back panel it's attached to. 

The movement and flow of the work are all created by the growing and shrinking aluminium shapes. While it looks like a very mathematical exercise, the artist said she "let my hand flow freely" and did "not seek these diversifications which come spontaneously". 

Now there are many more artists on show in FAMM -- Dorothea Tanning, Niki de Saint Phalle, Barbara Hepworth, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo and Sonia Delaunay to pick out just some of the biggest names. Your tour concludes in the basement, where they keep the most contemporary art. Some of the works here are massive, such as Jesse Mockrin's 3.5-metre-wide The Venus Effect, a modern feminist take on a theme constantly tackled by male painters down the centuries.

Strikingly different is Whispers of Sorghum II, by Ugandan-born Stacey Gillian Abe, a mix of acrylic paint and embroidery on canvas. 

"In the summer, the wind passed across the sorghum fields just as they were about to be harvested," she says. "Every morning, I would get up just before dawn and have breakfast behind my grandmother's kitchen, overlooking the sorghum fields." 

This is a museum to make new discoveries. And, clearly, to help you reassess your own perception of art history.

Practicalities

FAMM is located in the old village of Mougins, a few kilometres to the north of Cannes. It's open daily from 1000 to 1800, and until 2000 from late June to the end of September. Check the website for occasional closures. Full-price tickets cost 16 euros. Allow yourself a good hour to explore the museum. Mougins is where Pablo Picasso lived out his final years, and there's a huge outdoor sculpture of his head not too far from the gallery. 

There's a frequent service on Palm Bus route B from the station in Cannes to Val de Mougins, from where it's a steep 15-minute walk up to the old village, or you can connect with less frequent routes 26 and 28 up to Mougins itself. The local bus service is surprisingly user-friendly -- just tap on with a contactless credit or debit card. There are frequent local trains to Cannes from Nice, taking about half an hour. If you're travelling by car to Mougins, parking is available on the edge of the old village, underneath the head of Picasso. 

Images

Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933), Girl on a Balcony, 1894
Jeanne Hébuterne (1898-1920), Portrait of Chaïm Soutine, c. 1917-19
Leonor Fini (1907-1996), The Train, 1975
Jane Graverol (1905-1984), Untitled, 1959
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Ship of Cranes, 2010
Dadamaino (1930-2004), Oggetto ottico-dinamico, 1962-71
Stacey Gillian Abe (b. 1990), Whispers of Sorghum II (detail), 2023