Pablo Picasso
On Tuesday, April 14th, a French man learned he had won a €1 million Picasso painting in a raffle.
The 1 Picasso 100 Euros raffle is an event put on by the Picasso Estate in collaboration with a prominent charity. This year, it was the Fondation Recherche Alzheimer, one of the most prominent private Alzheimer’s charities in France. This is now the third time such an event has been put on, the first being in 2013. This year, they sold 120,000 tickets worldwide. At €100 each, the raffle raised €12 million for Alzheimer’s research. This year, the raffle prize was a gouache painting on paper by Pablo Picasso. The painting, created in 1941, is a portrait of Picasso’s partner Dora Maar. The painting was contributed to the raffle by the London-based Opera Gallery, and the drawing was conducted at Christie’s Paris. The gallery originally intended to sell the painting for €1.45 million, but decided to accept a lower price from the raffle contributions since it was for a charitable cause.
The 1 Picasso 100 Euros raffle was initially developed by the French television host Péri Cochin. In 2013, she organized the event in which the Picasso Estate partnered with the International Association to Save Tyre. The raffle raised €4.8 million to help restore the ancient Lebanese city, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That year, the 1914 gouache painting Man with an Opera Hat went to a 25-year-old man from Pennsylvania. For the next raffle in 2020, the charity CARE International was chosen. The €5.1 million raised went to build and maintain wells and promote hygiene initiatives in villages in Cameroon, Madagascar, and Morocco. That year, an Italian accountant won the 1921 oil painting Still Life after her son bought her a ticket as a gift.
2026 saw a marked increase in raffle ticket sales compared to previous iterations. The 2020 raffle sold only around 50,000 tickets. This year’s winner was a French engineer named Ari Hodara. At the drawing, Christie’s video called him to tell him the good news. “How do I know this isn’t a prank?” he responded. Hodara has stated his intention to keep the painting for himself rather than sell it. Citing the artist’s generosity, Picasso’s grandson, Olivier, called the raffle “an absolutely logical and legitimate part of his legacy.”