Raffle winner surprised — even skeptical — upon landing $1M Picasso

A Parisian art enthusiast could not believe his luck when he found out Tuesday he’d won a Pablo Picasso painting worth more than $1 million in a raffle.

“How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” said Ari Hodara, 58, after organizers called him following the draw at Christie’s auction house in the French capital.

Hodara described himself as an art amateur fond of Picasso and said he bought his ticket over the weekend after finding out about the charity raffle by chance during a meal in a restaurant.

“First, I will tell the news to my wife, who has yet to return from work,” said Hodara, a sales engineer. “And at first, I think I’ll take advantage of it and keep it.”

The third iteration of the “1 Picasso for 100 euros” lottery was for Picasso’s Head of a Woman, a portrait of Picasso’s longtime muse and partner Dora Maar. The gouache-on-paper was painted in 1941. A 100 euro ticket works out to about $162.

The online draw offered the chance to win a painting by the Spanish master in aid of Alzheimer’s research.

Organizers said all 120,000 tickets were sold worldwide, netting 12 million euros ($19.5 million). Of that, one million euros will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owned the painting.

Gilles Dyan, the gallery founder, said he offered a preferential price for the painting, with the public price at 1.45 million euros ($2.35 million).

Millions raised

The first raffle in 2013 saw a Pennsylvania man who worked at a fire-sprinkler business win Man in the Opera Hat, which Picasso painted in 1914 during his Cubist period.

The oil-on-canvas Still Life was raffled off in 2020 and won by Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy whose son bought her the ticket as a Christmas present.

Painted in 1921, that painting was purchased for the raffle from billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who argued in an interview with The Associated Press that Picasso would have approved of his work being raffled. Picasso died in 1973.

The Alzheimer Research Foundation, the charity raffle’s organizer, is based in one of Paris’s leading public hospitals and says it has become France’s leading private financier of Alzheimer-related medical research since its founding in 2004.

Organizers said the two previous Picasso raffles raised a total of more than 10 million euros for cultural work in Lebanon and water and hygiene programs in Africa.