Siddhesh Joshi (Editor)

Maja Hoffmann

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Name
  
Maja Hoffmann


Role
  
Art collector

Maja Hoffmann with a serious face, messy hair, and wearing a green dress.

Parents
  
Daria Hoffmann-Razumovsky, Luc Hoffmann

Similar People
  
Luc Hoffmann, Sheila Nevins, Tamra Davis, Jeffrey Dupre, Matthew Akers

Born
  
1956 (age 65), Basel, Switzerland

Art collector maja hoffmann on gerhard richter at fondation beyeler


Maja Hoffmann (born 1956) is an avid Jewish-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.

Contents

Maja Hoffmann and Vlatka Horvat holding a cocktail glass. Maja with a serious face, messy hair, and wearing a green dress while Vlatka Horvat is with a serious face and wearing a brown dress.

Maja hoffmann fortune plan taire veut faire d arles un p le culturel


Early life and education

Maja Hoffmann smiling, with wavy hair, wearing a necklace, and a white blouse.

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 (1923–2016).

Maja Hoffmann smiling while leaning on the wall, with wavy hair, wearing a necklace, and a black shirt.

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.

Maja Hoffmann smiling, with wavy hair, wearing a necklace, and a red blouse.

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. 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.

Ms. Hoffmann is mother of two children with the film producer Stanley F. Buchthal, who in some of Hoffmann's films acts as co-executive producer. Buchthal, who comes from Teaneck, New Jersey was a founder of the Bugle Boy company and now runs his own media company, with Liz Garbus, The Dakota Group Limited.

Art collecting

Maja Hoffmann began her art collecting in the 1980s in New York City 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 2015 Steidl published a book offering insight into the private contemporary art and design collection of Ms. Hoffmann. The collection is distributed in her various dwelling locations at Arles, Zurich, Gstaad, London and Mosquito Island. The book contains photos by photographer François Halard of these locations mixed with Rirkrit Tiravanija's use of the British nursery rhyme "This is the House that Jack Built".

Documentary film executive production

As executive producer Ms. Hoffmann has realised a number of documentary films, including Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, Bobby Fischer Against the World, Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, The Party's Over, and Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.

Philanthropy

Ms. Hoffmann's philanthropy supports contemporary art, film, and environmental programmes around the world. 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.

She currently is active with her philanthropy at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Rencontres d'Arles in Arles, 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).

Ms. 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.

Activities in Arles

As part of a major initiative to transform Arles into an art city, Hoffmann founded LUMA Arles. 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.

Ms. Hoffmann also runs the Michelin-starred organic restaurant La Chassagnette, an organic restaurant in the Camargue outside Arles.

References

Maja Hoffmann Wikipedia