A French charity raffle is scheduled to take place Tuesday at Christie’s in Paris, offering one Picasso portrait to a ticket holder for €100 to raise money for Alzheimer’s research. Organizers are marketing the drawing as “1 Picasso for 100 euros,” with the contest set for a 6 p.m. draw at the auction house.
Tickets will be sold through an online platform with a stated cap of 120,000, and the organizers say the raffle could generate up to €12 million in proceeds if all tickets are purchased. The Alzheimer Research Foundation, which the organizers describe as the raffle’s organizer, says it is based in one of Paris’ leading public hospitals and that it has become France’s leading private financier of Alzheimer-related medical research since the charity’s 2004 founding.
Christie’s said the painting will be on view from Monday at its Paris galleries ahead of the Tuesday draw. The organizers say the proceeds will be split, with 1 million euros going to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owns the work.
The raffle painting for next week is a gouache on paper titled “Tête de Femme,” meaning “head of a woman,” which the AP report says was painted by Picasso in 1941. Organizers also previously offered two Picasso works in earlier editions of the raffle, including one in 2013 and another in 2020.
In the raffle’s inaugural 2013 edition, the ticket-winning work was “Man in the Opera Hat,” painted by Picasso in 1914 during his Cubist period; the AP report said a fire-sprinkler worker in Pennsylvania won. In the 2020 raffle, the painting was the oil-on-canvas “Nature Morte,” and the AP report said it was bought for Claudia Borgogno of Italy as a Christmas gift by her son.
David Nahmad, a billionaire art collector who the AP report said argued Picasso would have approved of raffling his work, was described in a rare interview with the Associated Press as saying the artist was “very generous.” Nahmad told AP that Picasso “gave paintings to his driver, his tailor” and that “He wanted his art to be collected by all kinds of people, not only by the super-rich.”
The AP report said the charity raffle organizers described the effort as building on results from the earlier Picasso raffles, saying the two previous events raised more than 10 million euros for cultural work in Lebanon and for water and hygiene programs in Africa.