A 58-year-old Parisian sales engineer has won a Pablo Picasso painting valued at over €1 million after purchasing a €100 raffle ticket on a whim over the weekend. Ari Hodara, who describes himself as an art lover and amateur painter, learned about the draw by chance — spotting an advertisement on a restaurant television — and could barely believe the news when organisers called him on Tuesday following the draw at Christie's auction house in Paris. "How do I check that it's not a hoax?" he asked, before confirming his first priority was to tell his wife. "At first I think I'll take advantage of it and keep it," he added.
The prize is Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman), a 1941 gouache-on-paper portrait painted in grey, white and cream tones — one of Picasso's many depictions of Dora Maar, his longtime muse and companion. Picasso's grandson Olivier Widmaier Picasso noted that the work was painted in the same studio as Guernica, arguably the artist's most famous piece, and suggested the €1 million valuation was conservative. "It is worth much more than a million euros," he told CNN ahead of the draw. The painting was provided by Opera Gallery, an international art dealership, which received €1 million from the proceeds; the remaining €11 million will go to a French foundation funding Alzheimer's research.
The raffle, run under the banner "1 Picasso for €100", sold all 120,000 tickets for the first time in its history, generating a total of €12 million. Organised in collaboration with the Picasso Foundation, the lottery is now in its third edition. Previous draws raised money for the preservation of the ancient UNESCO World Heritage city of Tyre in Lebanon, and for water and sanitation projects in Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco. In 2013, a 25-year-old American won Man in the Opera Hat; in 2020, an Italian accountant received Still Life as a Christmas gift from her son.
Hodara, who lives in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, is free to do as he wishes with the work — whether display it at home, loan it to an exhibition, or sell it. His winning ticket bore the number 94,715. The raffle model, which makes high-value art accessible to the general public while channelling significant funds to charitable causes, has now collectively raised more than €22 million across its three editions.