A €100 ticket could land you a Picasso.
That is the premise behind a new charity raffle in Paris, where organisers are once again turning one of the world’s most recognisable artists into a prize for the public rather than a private collector.
Set to take place at Christie’s in Paris, the draw offers participants the chance to win a work by Pablo Picasso for the price of a single ticket.
The initiative, titled “1 Picasso for 100 euros,” is designed to raise funds for Alzheimer’s research, with organisers aiming to sell up to 120,000 tickets.
If all are purchased, the raffle could generate as much as €12 million. Of that total, €1 million will go to the Opera Gallery, which owns the painting, while the remaining funds will support medical research through the Alzheimer Research Foundation.
The artwork up for grabs this year is “Tête de Femme,” a gouache on paper created by Picasso in 1941.
The portrait reflects a later period in the artist’s career, decades after his early Cubist experiments, and will be displayed publicly at Christie’s Paris galleries ahead of the draw.
This concept is not new. The first raffle, held in 2013, saw a fire-sprinkler worker in Pennsylvania win “Man in the Opera Hat,” painted in 1914.
A second draw in 2020 awarded the oil-on-canvas “Nature Morte” from 1921 to an Italian accountant, whose son had bought the ticket as a Christmas gift.
That 2020 painting was sourced from billionaire collector David Nahmad, who argued at the time that Picasso himself would have supported the idea of raffling his work.
“Picasso was very generous. He gave paintings to his driver, his tailor,” Nahmad said. “He wanted his art to be collected by all kinds of people, not only by the super-rich.”
Organisers say the previous two raffles raised more than €10 million combined, funding cultural initiatives in Lebanon as well as water and hygiene programmes in parts of Africa.
This latest edition shifts the focus firmly to health, backing research into Alzheimer’s disease through one of France’s leading hospital-based foundations.
For one ticket holder, the outcome could be life-changing.
For organisers, the hope is that thousands of smaller contributions will add up to sustained funding for research into a disease that continues to affect millions worldwide.
The draw will take place on the evening of Tuesday, 14 April in Paris.