Atout Coeur: Legs de Brigitte Mavromichalis

A French-language edition that displays an eclectic collection from Brigitte Mavromichalis, now exhibited at the Musée d’art du Valais. 

Brigitte Mavromichalis was born into high Swedish society in Stockholm in 1926. At the age of twenty, she was sent to Switzerland by her parents to pursue an academic education at the University of Lausanne, where she met her future husband. The couple, who loved traveling and culture, kept their Swiss residence but toured the world and visited countless museums. After her husband’s death in 1982, Mavromichalis continued to devote herself to her passion for art, music, and sport, excelling in bridge at an international level, and remained a discreet patron of the arts until her death in 2015.

She gathered her art collection, which grew over the decades, free of any hierarchy in media, style, and people. It consisted mainly of paintings, but also included drawings and prints, and was characterized by great diversity.

In 2023, the Musée d’art du Valais in Sion received a gift of forty-five works from Brigitte Mavromichalis’s collection. Atout Cœur portrays the collector and her bequest: all works are explained by distinguished art historians in concise texts.

Laurence Schmidlin is an art historian and curator and director of the Musée d’art du Valais in Sion, Switzerland.