Where artists go, money follows. It is a 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, 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 buildings wound tightly into defensive circuits of curving streets – finds itself suffused with wealth.
A few miles inland from Cannes, Mougins offers more cultured pleasures than that sometimes tawdry place, while still gathering some of its stardust. It has been popular with Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor and Catherine Deneuve, and is famous for its restaurants; there's even an annual festival of gastronomy. The town is also packed with art galleries – not all as good as its restaurants, but encompassing every imaginable genre, from picturesque landscapes to teeth-grating conceptual installations. On the town's edge the five-star Le Mas Candille hotel spreads over green slopes towards an exceptional view. In contrast with the ancient buildings, the hotel is spacious and, with a sophisticated restaurant, designed to serve the pleasures of a certain kind of international moneyed class.
Mougins is part of a landscape that attracted JG 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 4x4s hurtle round tiny lanes made for carts. Old agricultural buildings are remade as refined retail outlets. The forms of hard productive work co-exist 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 $400m 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 has also been 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.
Levett has strong connections with Mougins, where he owns two of the finest and most famous restaurants, La Place des Mougins and L'Amandier, both recently revamped under the direction of chef Denis Fétisson (previously of the Michelin two-star Le Cheval Blanc in Courchevel). La Place offers a richly extravagant tasting menu of foiegras, lobster, prawns and pigeon for ¤75 a head; L'Amandier, a white-walled former almond mill with terraces commanding the view towards the perfume-making town of Grasse, is more informal.
"It is a blessing for Mougins that Levett 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, where his collection, the result of seven years work, is now on show. His collaborator on the project has been Mark Merrony, an archaeologist who became editor of the art and archaeology magazine Minerva, which Levett now owns; he remains editor-in-chief of the magazine, but most of his energies have recently gone into the museum, of which he is now the director.
Among its many busts and statues the collection includes the Cobham Hall Hadrian, bought at Christie's for $900,000 in 2008; there are vases, glassware, jewellery and coins, and an array described as the world's "largest private collection of ancient armour", including a helmet dented with a blow that was probably fatal to its wearer. There are Egyptian 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 – intended to show the continuity of classical themes into the present. "These themes have been in the human psyche for 2,500 years," says Merrony. "That's the hardest thing to understand about humanity: the psyche."
The collection, 95% of which is on show, is packed into a plain medieval townhouse refurbished by the locally based architect David Price. The exhibits are lit against a dark background, and closely spaced, with ranks of busts confronting you almost as soon as you enter. As the lift and stairs take up a quarter of the total floor area, they are used as exhibition spaces, too – and the lift is of glass, so you can see exhibits when you are riding in it. Displays are lightly themed, the Egyptian objects arranged in a tomb-like basement. The modern works are dotted about the ancient objects to create contrasts and parallels that are striking but the sudden appearance of, say, a bright blue Yves Klein torso, or a Hirst skull, can seem a touch gimmicky.
The interior of the museum, in contrast with the rugged stone exterior, is like a pristine cave, with pieces that sometimes seem too perfect to be true. 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 and 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 Côte d'Azur, where artists' discovery of the delights of the region has been honoured 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 lzvittle 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, centred on a series of portraits of Picasso.
There is, too, the Fondation Maeght at St Paul de Vence, where you can find a collection of sculptures and paintings by artists including Calder, Miro, Chagall and, especially, Giacometti. They stand amid pines on a high breezy spot with a 1964 building by the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert. Sert's building – a plain structure made festive with a pink-brick and white-concrete colour scheme, and sunshades in the shape of upside-down barrel vaults – slips in among the trees, making outdoor terraces where the art sits easily between buildings and nature.
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.
Essentials
EasyJet flies to Nice from Gatwick, from £150 (easyjet.com). Hotel Le Mas Candille has rooms from €390 for two people per night (lemascandille.com). Eat at L'Amandier (amandier.fr). For further details of the Mougins Museum, go to mouginsmusee.com
