Maja Hoffmann
Maja Hoffmann (born 1956) is an avid Swiss art collector, art patron, documentary filmmaker, impresario, and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the LUMA Foundation in the Provençal city of Arles France.
Early life and education
Hoffmann is the granddaughter of the industrialist Emanuel (Manno) Hoffmann (1896-1932), daughter of Daria Hoffmann-Razumovsky (1925-2002) and the pharmaceutical magnate and renowned naturalist Luc Hoffmann.
Hoffmann’s grandmother, Maja Stehlin (1896-1989), collected Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Fernand Léger, Jean Tinguely and Georges Braque. She created the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation (whose collection forms the main core of the Schaulager) in 1933 to honour her husband Emanuel, who had died when his car was hit by a train when Maja Hoffmann’s father, Luc, was still a child.
In the 1980s, Maja Hoffmann studied film at the New School and at New York University in New York City. She then made a documentary film about the fishermen of the Sahara.[1] Today, she is part of the shareholder pool made up of descendants of the founder of the Roche Holding AG, which controls the Swiss health-care company Hoffmann-La Roche.[2]
Philanthropy
Maja Hoffmann's philanthropy supports contemporary art, film, and environmental programmes around the world. She began her art collecting in the 1980s in New York in the company of Swiss theatre director Werner Düggelin. They encountered and purchased works there by Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Andy Warhol and others.
In the 1990s, she worked at Luc Hoffmann's La Tour du Valat, focusing in on the breeding of the Przewalski’s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) and she helped reintroduce them to their native Mongolia in 2004.[3]
She currently is active with her philanthropy at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Venice Biennale, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and Human Rights Watch in New York. She is president of Kunsthalle Zürich and vice president of Basel’s Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, whose art collection was started by her grandparents and is now part of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Basel).
Hoffmann also serves as a board member of Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, New York’s New Museum (where a floor is dedicated to her) and London’s Tate Gallery, heading up its international council and funding its film programme. She is a key backer of the ongoing cultural programme in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.[4]
Activities in Arles
As part of a major initiative to transform Arles into an art city, Hoffmann founded LUMA Arles.[5] In 2014, she broke ground on LUMA Arles, a cultural complex designed by Frank Gehry for the production of art exhibitions, research, education and archives. It is scheduled for completion in 2018. Meanwhile, architect Annabelle Selldorf is renovating a cluster of 19th-century industrial buildings into spaces to make and show art. One of them is to house photography and be part of the city’s annual international photography festival, Rencontres d'Arles.[6]
Hoffmann also runs the Michelin-starred organic restaurant La Chassagnette, an organic restaurant in the Camargue outside Arles.
Footnotes
- ↑ Maja Hoffmann at W magazine
- ↑ Chris V. Nicholson (March 25, 2011), Roche’s Bloc of Heirs Lose Majority Vote After One Bolts New York Times.
- ↑ “Association pour le Cheval de Przewalski” Official TAKH site. Retrieved 21 August 2012.
- ↑ The Insider Art-world maverick Maja Hoffmann at W magazine
- ↑ Carol Vogel (May 31, 2012), Moon Landing in Arles New York Times.
- ↑ Carol Vogel (April 3, 2014), Arts Center in Arles New York Times.