PARIS — Are you feeling lucky? A raffle in France is offering the chance to win a portrait by Pablo Picasso for the price of a 100-euro ($117) ticket, with proceeds going to Alzheimer’s research.
The draw is on Tuesday at Christie’s auction house in Paris.
The inaugural “1 Picasso for 100 euros” raffle, in 2013, saw a fire-sprinkler worker in Pennsylvania win “Man in the Opera Hat,” which the Spanish master painted in 1914 during his Cubist period.
A second Picasso, the oil-on-canvas “Nature Morte,” was raffled off in 2020 and made a very happy mom of Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy. Her son bought her the ticket as a Christmas present.
That still life, painted in 1921, was purchased for the raffle from billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who argued in a rare Associated Press interview that Picasso would have approved of raffling his work. Picasso died in 1973.
“Picasso was very generous. He gave paintings to his driver, his tailor,” Nahmad said. “He wanted his art to be collected by all kinds of people, not only by the super-rich.”
The gouache on paper “Tête de Femme,” meaning “head of a woman,” up for grabs next week was painted by Picasso in 1941.
The Alzheimer Research Foundation, the charity raffle’s organizer, is based in one of Paris’ leading public hospitals and says it has become France’s leading private financier of Alzheimer-related medical research since its founding in 2004.
Christie’s auction house says the painting will be on view from Monday at its galleries in Paris, ahead of Tuesday’s 6 p.m. draw there.
The organizers’ online sales platform says the number of tickets will be capped at 120,000, meaning the draw could net 12 million euros ($14 million) if they’re all sold.
From the proceeds, 1 million euros will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owns the painting.
Organizers say 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.
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