Paris art enthusiast wins €1m Picasso painting in €100 charity raffle

A Parisian art enthusiast could not believe his luck when he found out on Tuesday he had won a Pablo Picasso painting worth more than €1m with a €100 raffle ticket.“How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” said Ari Hodara, 58, after organisers 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” lottery, in aid of Alzheimer’s research, offered Picasso’s Head of a Woman, a portrait of the artist’s longtime muse and partner Dora Maar painted in 1941.Organisers said all 120,000 tickets were sold, netting €12m (£10.4m), of which €1m 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 €1.45m.In the first raffle, in 2013, a Pennsylvania man who worked at a fire-sprinkler business won Man in the Opera Hat, which the Spanish master painted in 1914 during his cubist period.In 2020 the oil-on-canvas Still Life went to Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy whose son had bought her the ticket as a Christmas present.Organisers said the two previous Picasso raffles raised a total of more than €10m euros for cultural work in Lebanon and water and hygiene programmes in Africa.