Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – Tête de Femme
An original Pablo Picasso painting worth more than €1 million has just been won in a charity raffle. The winner is engineer and art enthusiast Ari Hodara. More than 120,000 tickets for the draw were sold at €100 each, raising around €11 million for Alzheimer’s research. This was the third edition of the “1 Picasso for 100 euros” fundraising raffle, founded in 2013. Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman) is a gouache-on-paper portrait of Picasso’s partner and muse, the French surrealist artist Dora Maar.
“How do I know this isn’t a prank?” the 58-year-old asked when he answered a video call from Christie’s in Paris. Hodara, who lives in Paris, bought his ticket number 94,715 over the weekend after learning about the competition by chance.
The first edition of the raffle was won by a 25-year-old American from Pennsylvania in 2013, with funds raised to help preserve the Lebanese city of Tyre – a Unesco World Heritage Site. A 58-year-old Italian accountant won the second edition, in 2020, after her son bought her a ticket for Christmas. Proceeds were donated to sanitation projects in schools and villages in Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco.