A lucky Paris-based engineer and lifelong art lover has walked away with a priceless original Pablo Picasso masterpiece, valued at more than €1 million ($1.2 million), after having his name drawn at random from a pool of over 120,000 global participants in a charity fundraising raffle. Fifty-eight-year-old Ari Hodara first learned of his win during a video call with officials from Christie’s Paris auction house on Tuesday, his initial reaction one of healthy skepticism rather than unbridled joy. When informed he was now the owner of the 1941 work by the iconic Spanish modernist, Hodara asked the auction team: “How do I know this isn’t a prank?”
Organized to accelerate research into Alzheimer’s disease, this year’s raffle sold 120,000+ entries at €100 apiece to buyers across dozens of countries around the world. The draw ultimately generated approximately €11 million in total proceeds, a major milestone for the fundraising initiative that has delivered impactful global grants across its previous two editions.
This year’s top prize was *Tête de Femme* (Head of a Woman), a gouache-on-paper portrait created in Picasso’s instantly recognizable cubist style that depicts Dora Maar, his partner and frequent creative muse who was a prominent French surrealist artist in her own right. In a post-draw interview with auction staff, Hodara shared his reaction to the life-changing win. “I was surprised, that’s it,” he explained. “When you bet on this, you don’t expect to win… But I’m very happy because I’m very interested in painting, and it’s great news for me.” Hodara purchased his winning ticket — number 94,715 — just days before the draw, after stumbling on information about the raffle by chance over the preceding weekend.
The charity initiative, dubbed “1 Picasso for 100 euros”, was founded in 2013 by French journalist Peri Cochin, and has received official backing from the Picasso family and the Picasso Foundation throughout its history. Cochin noted that it was an especially happy outcome that the winner was a local Paris resident, eliminating complex international logistics for the handover of the valuable artwork. “It’s going to be very easy for us to deliver the painting, so we’re happy,” she said. The selection of Paris also holds special cultural resonance: the city was Picasso’s primary home and creative base for most of his adult career, and Parisian museums hold thousands of the artist’s works in their permanent collections.
Of the total funds raised in this year’s draw, €1 million will go to the Opera Gallery, which owned the portrait prior to the raffle. The remainder of the proceeds will be donated to France’s Alzheimer’s Research Foundation to advance clinical and academic research into the neurodegenerative condition. Olivier de Ladoucette, head of the foundation, called the initiative a critical step forward in the global fight against Alzheimer’s. “This Picasso initiative is one more building block so that one day Alzheimer’s will be nothing more than a bad memory,” he told the AFP news agency.
This year’s draw marks the third installment of the recurring charity event, which has supported different good causes across its history. The inaugural 2013 raffle, which raised funds for preservation work at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Tyre in Lebanon, awarded the Picasso prize to a 25-year-old participant from Pennsylvania in the United States. The second edition, held in 2020, was won by a 58-year-old Italian accountant after her son gifted her a raffle ticket as a Christmas present. Proceeds from that draw funded public sanitation infrastructure projects in schools and rural communities across Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco.