The drawing was held at a ceremony broadcast live by Christie's auction house, with 120,000 tickets sold at €100 each to buyers from 52 countries, according to organizers. A leading auction house is raffling off tickets for one of Picasso's portraits for charity, with tickets up for grabs at €100, as reported by sources.
Hodara, a sales engineer, describes himself as an art lover with a passion for Picasso. He bought his ticket at the weekend after stumbling across the charity raffle while eating out, he said.
"How do I know this isn't a joke?"
The painting came from the Opera gallery, a private art dealer, which will collect €1 million of the funds raised, the gallery confirmed. Gilles Dyan, the gallery's founder, offered a preferential price for the painting, with the public price being €1.45 million, according to the gallery.
The organisers are led by French journalist Peri Cochin and supported by Picasso's family and foundation, they stated. They held two similar raffles to win works by Picasso in 2013 and 2020, organizers noted.
"I'm going to break the news to my wife first, who isn't back from work yet."
In 2013, a 25-year-old American from Pennsylvania working for a fire-extinguishing systems company won 'Man with an Opera Hat', a work painted in 1914 during Picasso's Cubist period, as per raffle records. In 2020, Claudia Borgogno, an accountant from Ventimiglia in north-west Italy, won 'Still Life', an oil on canvas painted in 1921, which was acquired for the raffle from billionaire art collector David Nahmad, according to organizers.
The remaining €11 million will be donated to the Alzheimer's Research Foundation, based at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, the foundation announced. The Foundation claims to have become France's leading private funder of medical research into Alzheimer's disease since its creation in 2004, it stated.
"And in the first instance, I think I'm going to enjoy it and keep it."
This raffle's unique value is highlighted by contrast with another Picasso masterpiece said to be worth millions of pounds that could soon be sold for just £87, as reported by auction sources.