A 58-year-old Paris-based engineer named Ari Hodara bought a raffle ticket on a whim, and ended up winning a gouache-on-paper painting by Picasso a few days later. The 1941 painting, Head of a Woman, is a portrait of the French artist’s lover and muse Dora Maar, an artist in her own right who was frequently painted by Picasso.
Before Hodara, the portrait was owned by Opera Gallery, an international operation with branches in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S. The gallery sold 120,000 tickets for 100 euros (about $110) each, to hopeful art enthusiasts around the world. The first 1 million euros ($1.2 million) raised went to Opera Gallery, with the rest being donated to the Fondation Recherche Alzheimer, a French organization.
The charitable endeavor, called “1 Picasso for 100 Euros,” was launched in 2013 by the Beirut-born French journalist Péri Cochin. The first iteration of the lottery was won by Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old man from a suburb of Pittsburgh, who won a L’Homme au Gibus (1914), also a gouache on paper. The money raised (about $5.7 million) was used to build a handicraft village in Tyre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the western coast of Lebanon. The 2nd edition dangled a Picasso oil painting, Nature Morte (1921), which went to a young Italian man (or rather, his mother; the lottery ticket was her Christmas gift), and raised $6 million for wells and sanitation improvements in Cameron, Madagascar, and Morocco.
According to NPR, Cochin and Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, are longtime friends. Olivier (whose co-manages his grandfather’s estate with several other heirs) told NPR that Picasso would approve of the “1 Picasso for 100 Euros” raffles. “He was a very generous man. He was very discreet, but he loved to help his siblings, his family and friends, and also people who were in need,” Olivier said. “For me, acting as a partner for the promotion is like continuing his path, continuing his generosity.”
