A charity raffle in Paris offers participants the chance to win a work by Pablo Picasso for the price of a single €100 ticket. The raffle is designed to raise funds for Alzheimer's research. Organisers aim to sell up to 120,000 tickets for the raffle.
If all tickets are purchased, the raffle could generate up to €12 million. Of the total funds, €1 million will go to the Opera Gallery, which owns the painting. The remaining funds will support medical research through the Alzheimer Research Foundation.
The exact date of the raffle draw and how many tickets have been sold so far have not been disclosed, nor have the specific Alzheimer's research projects that will benefit from the proceeds. The artwork up for grabs is 'Tête de Femme', a gouache on paper created by Picasso in 1941. The portrait reflects a later period in Picasso's career, decades after his early Cubist experiments.
It will be displayed publicly at Christie's Paris galleries ahead of the draw. This is not the first such initiative; previous raffles have seen significant success. The first raffle in 2013 saw a fire-sprinkler worker in Pennsylvania win 'Man in the Opera Hat', painted in 1914.
A second draw in 2020 awarded the oil-on-canvas 'Nature Morte' from 1921 to an Italian accountant, whose son had bought the ticket as a Christmas gift. The 2020 painting was sourced from billionaire collector David Nahmad. Organisers say the previous two raffles raised more than €10 million combined.
Those earlier efforts funded cultural initiatives in Lebanon as well as water and hygiene programmes in parts of Africa. This latest edition shifts the focus firmly to health, backing research into Alzheimer's disease through one of France's leading hospital-based foundations.