Paris — A Parisian man couldn’t believe his luck Tuesday when he discovered he had won a $1 million Pablo Picasso painting with a $117 lottery ticket.
“How can I be sure it’s not a hoax?” Ari Hodara (58 years old) said after organizers contacted him following the draw at Christie’s Auction House in the French capital.
Hodara described himself as an art enthusiast with a passion for Picasso, and said he bought his ticket over the weekend after learning of the charity raffle by chance while having a meal at a restaurant.
“First, I will tell my wife the news, who has not yet returned from work,” said Hodara, a sales engineer. “At first, I think I’ll take advantage of it and keep it.”
People look at Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman, painted in 1941, in Paris, Friday, April 10, 2026.
AP Photo/Michel Euler
The third edition of the “1 Picasso for €100” lottery was for Picasso’s “Head of a Woman”, a portrait of Picasso’s muse and partner Dora Maar. The artist painted gouache on paper in 1941.
The online raffle provided an opportunity to win a $1 million painting by the Spanish artist to help with Alzheimer’s disease research.
Organizers said all 120,000 tickets were sold worldwide, generating 12 million euros ($14 million). Of this amount, one million euros will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art sales agency that owns the painting.
Gilles Dayan, founder of the gallery, said he had offered a preferential price for the painting, with the general price reaching 1.45 million euros.
The first drawing in 2013 saw a Pennsylvania man who worked for a fire sprinkler company win the painting “Man in an Opera Hat,” painted by the Spanish artist in 1914 during the Cubist period.
The “Still Life” oil-on-canvas painting was raffled off in 2020 and was won by Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy for whom her son bought the ticket as a Christmas present.
Painted in 1921, the painting was purchased for a raffle by billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who argued in an interview with the Associated Press that Picasso would have agreed to raffle off his works. Picasso died in 1973.
The Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, the organizer of the charity raffle, is based in one of Paris’s leading public hospitals and says it has become France’s leading private funder of medical research into Alzheimer’s disease since its founding in 2004.
Organizers said the two previous Picasso raffles raised more than 10 million euros for cultural work in Lebanon and water and hygiene programs in Africa.
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