A Paris engineer just turned a raffle ticket into a Picasso.
Ari Hodara, a 58-year-old engineer based in Paris, has won Pablo Picasso’s 1941 gouache-on-paper portrait “Head of a Woman” through the charity lottery “1 Picasso for 100 Euros.” The work depicts Dora Maar, the French artist’s lover and frequent subject, and it was awarded after Opera Gallery sold 120,000 tickets at 100 euros each.
The lottery, launched in 2013 by Beirut-born French journalist Péri Cochin, has become an unusual fundraising model in the art world: part prize draw, part philanthropic campaign, with a blue-chip artwork at its center. In this latest edition, the first 1 million euros raised went to Opera Gallery, which has branches across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S. The remaining proceeds were donated to Fondation Recherche Alzheimer, a French organization supporting Alzheimer’s research.
The format has a track record. The first edition was won by Jeffrey Gonano, then 25 and living in a suburb of Pittsburgh, who received Picasso’s 1914 gouache on paper “L’Homme au Gibus.” That campaign raised about $5.7 million and funded a handicraft village in Tyre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on Lebanon’s western coast. The second edition offered the 1921 oil painting “Nature Morte,” which went to a young Italian man after his mother gave him the ticket as a Christmas gift; it raised $6 million for wells and sanitation projects in Cameron, Madagascar, and Morocco.
According to NPR, Cochin and Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, are longtime friends. Olivier, who co-manages the artist’s estate with other heirs, said Picasso would have approved of the initiative, describing his grandfather as generous, discreet, and committed to helping family and people in need. For the lottery’s organizers, that spirit has become part of the project’s appeal: a way to link a major modern master to direct, practical giving.
