Sales engineer takes home $1 million Picasso with $117 raffle ticket

A sales engineer from Paris won a Pablo Picasso painting worth at least $1 million in a raffle this week, which he’d entered with just a $117 raffle ticket. 

Ari Hodara, 58, described himself as an amateur art enthusiast and fan of Picasso’s work. He said he’d bought a ticket just days earlier for the charity raffle at Christie’s auction house, in the French capital, after hearing about it by chance during a meal at a restaurant.

When raffle organizers called him to report the outcome of the draw on Tuesday, Hodara was so stunned he asked if the call was real.

“How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” he asked.

Hodara was not the only raffle entrant who bought their ticket on a whim. People from around the world purchased tickets for 100 euros each — or about $117 — to enter the auction that ultimately raised about $14 million for Alzheimer’s research.

“First, I will tell the news to my wife, who has yet to return from work,” Hodara said. “And at first, I think I’ll take advantage of it and keep it.”

The third iteration of the “1 Picasso for 100 euros” lottery was for Picasso’s “Head of a Woman,” a portrait of Picasso’s longtime muse and partner Dora Maar. The gouache-on-paper was painted by the artist in 1941.

Organizers of the raffle said 120,000 tickets were sold worldwide, netting 12 million euros, or $14 million. Of that, 1 million euros will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owned the painting.

Gilles Dyan, the gallery founder, said he offered a preferential price for the painting, with the public price at 1.45 million euros.

The first raffle in 2013 saw a Pennsylvania man who worked at a fire-sprinkler business win “Man in the Opera Hat,” which the Spanish master painted in 1914 during his Cubist period.

The oil-on-canvas “Still Life” was raffled off in 2020 and won by Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy whose son bought her the ticket as a Christmas present.

Painted in 1921, that work was purchased for the raffle from billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who argued in an interview with The Associated Press that Picasso would have approved of his work being raffled. Picasso died in 1973.

The Alzheimer Research Foundation, the charity raffle’s organizer, is based in one of Paris’ leading public hospitals and says it has become France’s leading private financier of Alzheimer-related medical research since its founding in 2004.

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.