Buy a $150 charity raffle ticket for chance to win a million-dollar Picasso
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Pablo Picasso’s 1941 watercolour painting Tete de femme on display at Christie’s auction house.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Jenny Gross
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FRANCE – A French charity is testing an unusual fund-raising approach in the fine art world: raffling off a Picasso painting worth more than €1 million (S$1.5 million) to one winner.
The raffle tickets are on sale for €100 (S$150) each and proceeds will go towards research into Alzheimer’s disease. The prize is Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s 1941 portrait, Tete de femme.
Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, which is hosting the raffle, was founded in 2004 and is France’s leading funder of Alzheimer’s research.
The charity raises money for clinical research programmes, funds doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, and promotes the sharing of research.
French television producer Peri Cochin said she came up with the idea for a raffle after having seen her mother use them at fund-raising events she hosted.
Ms Cochin, who owns Waww La Table, a tableware company, said that instead of offering raffle tickets to a few hundred people, as is typical, she wanted to hold a raffle that was open to anyone in the world.
She tried to imagine what object or item would appeal to most people and Picasso’s artwork came to mind.
Mr Olivier Picasso, Pablo Picasso’s grandson and a childhood friend of hers, was on board, she said, and she reserved the 1941 painting from the Opera Gallery, which will be paid slightly under €1 million after the draw.
The goal, she said, is to sell 120,000 tickets, enough to cover the cost of the painting and raise some €11 million for Alzheimer’s research.
If not enough tickets are sold to cover the cost of the painting, all participants will be reimbursed, she said.
Raffle tickets are being sold online. The draw will take place at Christie’s in Paris on April 14 at 6pm local time.
Mr Olivier Picasso said the piece being raffled off, Tete de femme, was most likely painted in the same Paris studio where his grandfather painted his 1937 masterpiece Guernica.
Pablo Picasso painted Tete de femme in 1941 during the breakdown of his marriage to Ms Olga Khokhlova, his first wife. That period was “extremely complicated for my grandfather”, said Mr Olivier Picasso.
He added that the black, grey and brown colours in the piece reflected the unhappiness the artist, who died in 1973 at age 91, was experiencing at the time.
“Associating the name of Pablo Picasso with a charitable purpose is very important because my grandfather was very generous with the people around him,” he said.
Despite decades of research, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, the most commonly diagnosed form of dementia, and no treatment that can stop or reverse its progression.
Ms Cochin has organised two other raffles for Picasso paintings, with the first in 2013 and the second in 2020, raising a total of more than €10 million.
The 2013 winner was Mr Jeffrey Gonano, who at the age of 25 became the owner of a Picasso drawing valued at €860,000.
The 2020 winner was Ms Claudia Borgogno, an accountant from Ventimiglia, Italy, whose son had given her a raffle ticket for Christmas. She won a 1921 Picasso valued at €1 million. NYTIMES
