Last week I led a panel discussion on AI and the future of art valuation at the Appraisers Association of America’s annual conference at the New York Athletic Club in New York. The session brought together Nicholas Pilz, MAI, SRA, AI-RRS, Chair of the Appraisal Standards Board, and Olivier Berger, Co-CEO of Wondeur Ai, to examine how artificial intelligence is reshaping professional appraisal practice.

Maja Hoffmann is a Swiss art collector, benefactor, philanthropist, and film producer.

Hoffmann is the great-granddaughter of Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, who founded the pharmaceutical enterprise Hoffmann-La Roche. Her grandparents were businessman Emanuel Hoffmann and sculptor Maja Hoffmann-Stehlin. They began collecting artworks by Marc Chagall, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and others while living in Brussels in the 1920s, advised by the dealer Walter Schwarzenberg.

Paul Guillaume (1891-1934) rose from humble beginnings to become one of the leading art dealer-collectors of Paris in the early twentieth century. As a young man, he worked in an upscale garage that imported rubber for tires from the French colonies. Occasionally, the shipments would include African sculptures.