Were people supportive of your new direction?
CL: The mayor of Mougins, Richard Galy, used to describe the MACM as ‘Le petit Louvre’, so when I told him my idea he started to cry. But the mayor knows a lot about art, and once we chatted and I’d explained my idea, he came onboard. It was harder for those in the office, because they had to switch from being classicists to experts on modern art, which was a huge shock. They’ve done a remarkable job, and hopefully the rest of the world likes it too.
Did you ever think of opening the museum in London?
CL: When I planned the MACM, I thought it might look a bit odd in London, whereas Mougins was in the heart of the old Roman empire, and a lot of the towns down here were Greek trading cities originally, so it made sense. I had no experience of speaking to the art press — I thought they might wonder who this fund manager was. With the benefit of hindsight, I think the press would have taken it really well, but at the time I had no experience of speaking to them. It will be interesting to see how people take to a female artist museum here. It’s a bit of a test, but so far the response has been amazingly positive.
Why did you decide on the timeframe of 1870 to the present?
CL: I needed the collection to be cohesive and tell a story, and that story is the birth of modern art. If you start going back to Old Masters, it opens up a whole can of worms. I didn’t want to throw in a Lavinia Fontana from 1590 or a 17th-century Dutch female painter — it starts getting a bit all over the place, and it would have taken considerable time to put together a 500-year chronology.
