Christian Levett is apologizing for the state of his office. He has just returned from Mexico City Art Week and is trying to get to grips with the backlog of correspondence. Speaking via video call from his Renaissance-era palazzo in Florence, his large corner desk is covered with lever-arch files and monographs, and there’s a small geometric sculpture by the artist Dorothy Dehner. ‘She was David Smith’s first wife,’ Levett says, ‘and like many female artists was largely forgotten – it’s a common story.’

This is a theme that runs through the Christian Levett Collection. Since the former hedge-fund manager began collecting work by women artists eight years ago, he has lost count how many times he has bought something by someone who has lapsed into obscurity. The catalyst was the divorce from his first wife in 2013: ‘She got the best part of the old masters, so I was trying to rebuild the collection, just looking for great works of art.’ An interest in Abstract Expressionism shifted his focus and he noticed a stark imbalance in the market between 1940s and 1950s male and female artists. ‘A female artist is a thousandth of the price of the male equivalent,’ he says. ‘I just thought that I could put together a superb museum collection by only buying female artists. I became a little obsessive, reading up about Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan, and it grew from there.’

Today his blue-chip collection, spanning Impressionism to the present day, is housed in the beautiful Femme Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM) in the south of France. The building, which he originally established as a museum of antiquities, reopened in 2024, and was conceived as a corrective to the persistent marginalization of women artists. Among its treasures are paintings by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Frankenthaler, Krasner, Dorothea Tanning, and Shirin Neshat.

Sometimes the scope of Levett’s acquisitions can seem overwhelming. During the conversation he lists his most recent purchases: a painting by Julie Manet, four by Leonor Fini, and two by Louisa Chase, as well as works by Françoise Gilot, Sofía Bassi, Ana Mendieta, and Suzanne Fabry. Yet it is hard not to be impressed by a man who grew up in a family of relatively modest means in Southend-on-Sea, a fading seaside town in the predominantly working-class county of Essex in the UK, and spent his holidays collecting Roman coins.

After school he entered the finance sector as a commodities trader and didn’t have his first real experience of an art gallery until his twenties, when he was living in Paris and working for American International Group (AIG). He bought his first artwork, a Dutch old master painting, at the grand old age of 25. Today, his collection is estimated to have some 1,700 artworks.

The psychology behind financial trading has, he agrees, been invaluable in helping him navigate the perplexing world of the primary and secondary art markets, where it is often hard to know the true cost of a work of art. ‘I’ve almost never paid an exorbitant price for something just to get it, even if it suits the collection really well,’ he says.

This was the case with a recent Artemisia Gentileschi painting that he acquired privately in December after it failed to sell at Christie’s: ‘It is a stunning piece, very large, and the restoration is meticulous – months of work.’ The final price was, he says, a fraction of the original estimate.

Recent rediscoveries, meanwhile, include the artist Louisa Chase, who died in 2016. ‘She appeared in museum exhibitions alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Guston, and in 1982 produced a series of paintings with skulls and heads that look a little like Basquiat’s work,’ he says.

Born in 1951, the Yale graduate’s turbulent paintings have a poetic intensity. Her large-scale canvases – all angry oil stick and indeterminate markings – seem to articulate some epic narrative, even when obscured by hazy whitewash. It is easy to see how she complements Levett’s 100-strong collection of women Abstract Expressionists.

The collector’s other great passion is female Surrealist painters. As well as work by Tanning, he owns pieces by Leonora Carrington, Jane Graverol, and Ithell Colquhoun, and has one of the largest collections of paintings by Fini, many of which will be exhibited in the artist’s forthcoming retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt later this year. Levett considers her one of the great painters of the 20th century: ‘The quality of the painting, the imagination, the composition – it’s masterful.’

Having missed out on buying a Remedios Varo – ‘She’s been popular for a few years, it’s hard to buy her work’ – he recently discovered the Mexican painter Bassi. ‘Her story is extraordinary,’ he enthuses. ‘She actually spent five years in prison for shooting someone – her daughter’s abusive husband. The general belief is that she was protecting her daughter, who [was the one said to have] actually shot him.’ Bassi’s luminous paintings, where gravity is suspended and the scale monstrous, often feature a lone figure in a sea-green miasma drifting toward fairy-tale castles. Levett has bought three for the collection.

By his own admission, the collector is a relentless multitasker. He has published several books – most notably on his collection of female Abstract Expressionist artists – sponsors artist residencies, including Dragon Hill at the stunning Jacques Couëlle house in Mougins, and is committed to lending works to museums. That way, he says, ‘you start building the provenance and history that should have been there for decades. When I bought many of these paintings they had barely been exhibited.’ Currently he has 25 works out on loan, alongside 50 Abstract Expressionist paintings touring the United States. ‘Selfishly, it’s fun to stand in a museum and watch people respond to a painting you own,’ he says.

He relies on an army of assistants. One of his researchers is a lecturer in Renaissance history at Stanford University. ‘I bought an early sketchbook by Cecily Brown for £30,000 at auction – but its real significance came when we discovered that several of the drawings were studies of Renaissance figures from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and frescoes by Raphael. No one had bothered to look at the book closely enough.’

It is fair to say he enjoys the detective work as much as the acquisitions. ‘The deeper you go into the history of art by women,’ he says, ‘the more you realize how much of it still needs to be told. The real reward is helping to rebuild the stories and histories around them.’