PARIS (AP) \u2014 A Parisian man could not believe his luck on Tuesday when he found out he\u2019d won a Pablo Picasso painting worth $1 million with a $117 raffle ticket. <\/p>\n
\u201cHow do I check that it\u2019s not a hoax?\u201d said Ari Hodara, 58, after organizers called him following the draw at Christie\u2019s auction house in the French capital.<\/p>\n
Hodara described himself as an art amateur fond of Picasso and said he bought his ticket over the weekend after finding out about the charity raffle by chance during a meal in a restaurant. <\/p>\n
\u201cFirst, I will tell the news to my wife, who has yet to return from work,\u201d said Hodara, a sales engineer. \u201cAnd at first, I think I\u2019ll take advantage of it and keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The third iteration of the \u201c1 Picasso for 100 euros\u201d lottery was for Picasso\u2019s \u201cHead of a Woman,\u201d a portrait of Picasso\u2019s longtime muse and partner Dora Maar. The gouache-on-paper was painted by the artist in 1941.<\/p>\n
The online draw offered the chance to win a $1 million portrait by the Spanish artist in aid of Alzheimer\u2019s<\/a> research. <\/p>\n Organizers said all 120,000 tickets were sold worldwide, netting 12 million euros ($14 million). Of that, 1 million euros will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owned the painting.<\/p>\n Gilles Dyan, the gallery founder, said he offered a preferential price for the painting, with the public price at 1.45 million euros. <\/p>\n The first raffle in 2013<\/a> saw a Pennsylvania man who worked at a fire-sprinkler business<\/a> win \u201cMan in the Opera Hat,\u201d which the Spanish master painted in 1914 during his Cubist period.<\/p>\n The oil-on-canvas \u201cStill Life\u201d was raffled off in 2020 and won by Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy whose son bought her the ticket<\/a> as a Christmas present.<\/p>\n Painted in 1921, that painting was purchased for the raffle from billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who argued in an interview with The Associated Press<\/a> that Picasso would have approved of his work being raffled. Picasso died in 1973<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Alzheimer Research Foundation, the charity raffle\u2019s organizer, is based in one of Paris\u2019 leading public hospitals and says it has become France\u2019s leading private financier of Alzheimer-related medical research since its founding in 2004.<\/p>\n Organizers said the two previous Picasso raffles raised a total of more than 10 million euros for cultural work in Lebanon and water and hygiene programs in Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS (AP) \u2014 A Parisian man could not believe his luck on Tuesday when he found out he\u2019d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[18368,255798,228,226,227,255800,255799,1103,229,101671,88,594,793,255801,149,86291,2031,34849,1033,593,965],"class_list":{"0":"post-584146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-alzheimers-disease","9":"tag-ari-hodara","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-claudia-borgogno","14":"tag-david-nahmad","15":"tag-dementia","16":"tag-design","17":"tag-dora-maar","18":"tag-entertainment","19":"tag-france","20":"tag-general-news","21":"tag-gilles-dyan","22":"tag-lifestyle","23":"tag-lotteries","24":"tag-oddities","25":"tag-pablo-picasso","26":"tag-painting","27":"tag-paris","28":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}