A French engineer has won an original painting by Pablo Picasso worth about €1m (£868,950) in a charity raffle, after buying a €100 (£86.8) ticket just days before the draw.
Ari Hodara, a 58-year-old sales engineer, was selected at random on Tuesday at a ceremony live-streamed from Christie’s in Paris. More than 120,000 tickets had been sold globally at €100 each, raising €12m (£10.4m).
Organisers said it was a happy coincidence that Hodara is also Paris-based, joking that it would make shipping the prize to him easier.
“How do I know this isn’t a prank?” Hodara asked after being contacted by organisers via video call after the draw, according to AFP. “I was surprised, that’s it. When you bet on this, you don’t expect to win,” he said during the call.
The prize, titled Tête de femme (“Head of a Woman”), is a 1941 gouache-on-paper portrait depicting Dora Maar, Picasso’s partner and muse. The work, rendered in grey, white, and blue tones, reflects the sombre mood of the wartime period while suggesting a degree of hope, Picasso’s grandson Olivier Widmaier Picasso said.
Hodara said he bought the ticket over the weekend after hearing about the raffle by chance while out for a meal. “First, I will tell the news to my wife, who has yet to return from work,” said Hodara, adding that he planned to keep the painting.
The 1 Picasso for €100 raffle, now in its third edition, was launched in 2013 by French journalist Peri Cochin with support from Picasso’s family and foundation.
All 120,000 tickets were sold for the first time in the raffle’s history, organisers said, with participants from 52 countries. Of the funds raised, €1m will go to Opera Gallery, the international dealership that owned the painting, while the remaining roughly €11m (£9.5m) will be donated to France’s Fondation Recherche Alzheimer.
“The funding for research is ridiculous,” said Olivier de Ladoucette on Tuesday. “In our developed societies, we still haven’t understood that this is a major public health issue and that absolutely everyone needs to get involved. This Picasso initiative is one more building block so that one day Alzheimer’s will be nothing more than a bad memory.”
The Alzheimer Research Foundation, which organised the raffle, is based in a leading Paris public hospital and has become France’s leading private financier of Alzheimer’s research since it was founded in 2004, AP reported.
Previous editions of the raffle have also paired high-value artworks with charitable causes. In 2013, a 25-year-old American from Pennsylvania won Picasso’s Man in the Opera Hat, with €4.8m (£4.1m) raised to support preservation efforts in the Unesco-listed Lebanese city of Tyre.
In 2020, an Italian accountant from Ventimiglia won Nature Morte with a ticket gifted by her son at Christmas, with proceeds funding sanitation and water projects in Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco.
Organisers said the initiative aims to combine access to major works of art with large-scale fundraising, offering members of the public the chance to acquire an original Picasso while contributing to medical research.
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