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A Picasso painting worth more than €1m (£870,000) has been won in a raffle by a software engineer from Paris who thought the whole thing might be a hoax.
Ari Hodara learned he was the winner of the raffle on Tuesday when he answered a video call from Christie’s auction house in Paris. “How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” the 58 year-old asked when he was told he was the new owner of the 1941 work by the Spanish master.
Hodara described himself as an art amateur fond of Picasso and said he had bought the €100 ticket over the weekend after finding out about the charity raffle by chance during a meal in a restaurant.
“First, I will tell the news to my wife, who has yet to return from work,” he said. “And at first I think I’ll take advantage of it and keep it.”
The third iteration of the “1 Picasso for €100” lottery, which is in aid of Alzheimer’s research, offered Picasso’s Head of a Woman, a portrait of the artist’s longtime muse and partner Dora Maar painted in 1941.
Organisers said all 120,000 tickets had been sold, netting €12m (£10.4m), of which €1m will be paid to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owned the painting. Gilles Dyan, the gallery founder, said he had offered a preferential price for the painting, with the public price at €1.45m.
Picasso’s grandson, Olivier, previously told the Guardian the project was a natural continuation of the artist’s legacy.
“My grandfather was very generous, but he was also discreet,” he said. “He helped his family, especially my grandmother Marie-Thérèse [Walter]. He helped friends. He helped people in need during the civil war in Spain, during the second world war and even after in the 50s and 60s.
“So for me, this project is an absolutely logical and legitimate part of his legacy. I hope in the future to be able to do this every year if possible.”
The raffle was the brainchild of Péri Cochin, a French television producer and host and owner of the tableware company Waww La Table. “I thought, wouldn’t it be great to do a worldwide raffle, by selling tickets online? I decided it should be a piece of art, and what is the most famous name in art? Obviously, it’s Picasso,” she said.
Olivier Picasso said Tête de femme was a “very interesting” work that was painted in the same studio in the Left Bank in Paris as his grandfather’s 1937 masterpiece Guernica. “The period was important for my grandfather, because he was at the end of a process to divorce his first wife, Olga Khokhlova – a divorce that never happened because Franco abolished the divorce law [in 1939], despite meeting my grandmother and Dora Maar.
“The period was also very complicated because of the occupation of Paris by the Nazis. And so the colours are darker than usual, with brown, black, and grey. While it’s a beautiful depiction of a woman, there is still the ambience of Picasso. My grandfather kept the painting as a souvenir of the moment.”
In the first raffle, in 2013, a Pennsylvania man who worked at a fire-sprinkler business won Man in the Opera Hat, which Picasso painted in 1914 during his cubist period.
In 2020, the oil-on-canvas Still Life went to Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy whose son had bought her the ticket as a Christmas present.
The two previous Picasso raffles raised a total of more than €10m for cultural work in Lebanon and water and hygiene programmes in Africa.
