€1m Picasso painting to be won for €100 in charity raffle

A raffle in France is offering the chance to win a portrait by Pablo Picasso for the price of a €100 (£87) ticket, with proceeds going to Alzheimer’s research.Picasso painted the gouache-on-paper Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman) in 1941. The raffle organisers’ online sales platform says the number of tickets will be capped at 120,000, meaning the draw could net €12m if they are all sold.From the proceeds, €1m will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owns the painting. The raffle will benefit the Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, based in one of Paris’s leading public hospitals.Organisers say two previous Picasso raffles raised more than €10m for cultural work in Lebanon and water and hygiene programmes in Africa.In the inaugural “1 Picasso for €100” raffle, in 2013, a fire-sprinkler worker in Pennsylvania won 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 went to an accountant in Italy whose son had bought her the ticket as a Christmas present.That still life, painted in 1921, was bought for the raffle from the billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who argued in an 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.”Tête de Femme will be on view at Christie’s auction house in Paris from Monday and the draw will be held there at 6pm local time on Tuesday.