Ari Hodara, a 58-year-old sales engineer from Paris, won the portrait of Dora Maar titled 'Tête de femme' ('Head of a Woman'), a gouache painted in 1941, according to multiple reports. The raffle ticket cost €100, with 120,000 tickets sold to buyers from 52 countries. The drawing ceremony was broadcast live by Christie's auction house.
The money raised will be donated to Alzheimer's research, with the remaining €11 million beyond the painting's cost to be donated to the Alzheimer's Research Foundation, based at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. This foundation claims to be France's leading private funder of medical research into Alzheimer's disease since 2004. The painting came from the Opera Gallery, a private art dealer, which will collect €1 million of the €12 million raised.
How do I know this isn't a joke?
45 million. Hodara bought his ticket at the weekend after stumbling across the charity raffle while eating out. The organizers are led by French journalist Peri Cochin and supported by Picasso's family and foundation.
Two similar raffles for Picasso works were held in 2013 and 2020. In 2013, a 25-year-old American from Pennsylvania won 'Man with an Opera Hat', a work painted in 1914. In 2020, Claudia Borgogno, an accountant from Ventimiglia, Italy, won 'Still Life', an oil on canvas painted in 1921, which was acquired from billionaire art collector David Nahmad.
I'm going to break the news to my wife first, who isn't back from work yet. And in the first instance, I think I'm going to enjoy it and keep it.
The two previous Picasso raffles raised more than €10 million for cultural projects in Lebanon and water and sanitation programmes in Africa. A leading auction house is raffling off tickets for a Picasso portrait for charity.