A Parisian sales engineer is still processing his luck after winning a Pablo Picasso painting worth at least $1 million in a charity raffle he entered with a single $117 ticket.
Ari Hodara, 58, described himself as an art enthusiast and longtime fan of Picasso’s work. He said he purchased his ticket just days before the draw, after learning about the charity raffle by chance during a meal at a restaurant. When organizers called him Tuesday following the drawing at Christie’s auction house in Paris, Hodara was stunned. “How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” he asked.
“First, I will tell the news to my wife, who has yet to return from work,” Hodara said. “And at first, I think I’ll take advantage of it and keep it.”
The prize was Picasso’s “Head of a Woman,” a gouache-on-paper portrait of Dora Maar, the artist’s longtime muse and partner, painted in 1941. It marked the third edition of the “1 Picasso for 100 euros” lottery, an international raffle in which tickets are sold for 100 euros, or roughly $117, each.
Organizers said all 120,000 tickets were sold worldwide, raising 12 million euros, or about $14 million, for Alzheimer’s research. Of that total, 1 million euros will go to the Opera Gallery, the international art dealership that previously owned the painting. Gallery founder Gilles Dyan said he offered the piece at a preferential price for the raffle, noting its public market value stood at 1.45 million euros.
The raffle has a history of delivering life-changing wins to ordinary entrants. The first edition in 2013 was won by a Pennsylvania man working at a fire-sprinkler business, who took home “Man in the Opera Hat,” painted by Picasso in 1914 during his Cubist period.
The second edition, held in 2020, awarded the oil-on-canvas “Still Life” to Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy whose son had bought her the ticket as a Christmas gift.
That painting, completed in 1921, had been purchased for the raffle from billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who told the Associated Press he believed Picasso would have approved of his work being raffled off. Picasso died in 1973.
Organizers said the two previous Picasso raffles together raised more than 10 million euros for cultural initiatives in Lebanon and water and hygiene programs across Africa.
