A 58-year-old Parisian engineer wins €1m Picasso after buying €100 raffle ticket

By Serge Duchêne

Published on 15/04/2026 - 8:58 GMT+2

A Parisian engineer with a passion for art won an original Picasso painting worth over €1 million at a charity raffle. And it only cost him €100.

Ari Hodara, 58, was drawn at a ceremony broadcast live by Christie's auction house yesterday.

A total of 120,000 tickets were sold at €100 each. The money raised will be donated to Alzheimer's research.

The prize was a portrait of Dora Maar, one of Picasso's muses. Entitled "Tête de femme" ("Head of a Woman"), this gouache in deep grey and blue tones was painted in 1941 and came from the Opera gallery, a private art dealer - which will collect €1 million of the €12 million raised.

Gilles Dyan, the gallery's founder, said he had offered a preferential price for the painting, the public price being €1.45 million.

"How do I know this isn't a joke?" asked Hodara when he was called by the auction house after being drawn from ticket buyers from 52 countries.

He describes himself as an art lover with a passion for Picasso and explained that he bought his ticket at the weekend after stumbling across the charity raffle while eating out.

"I'm going to break the news to my wife first, who isn't back from work yet," says Hodara, a sales engineer. "And in the first instance, I think I'm going to enjoy it and keep it."

The organisers, led by French journalist Peri Cochin and supported by the painter's family and foundation, held two similar raffles to win works by the Spanish master in 2013 and 2020.

In the first draw in 2013, a 25-year-old American from Pennsylvania working for a fire-extinguishing systems company won "Man with an Opera Hat", a work by the Spanish master painted in 1914 during his Cubist period.

"Still Life", an oil on canvas, was put up for grabs in 2020 and won by Claudia Borgogno, an accountant from Ventimiglia in north-west Italy, whose son had given her the ticket for Christmas.

Painted in 1921, the painting was acquired for the raffle from billionaire art collector David Nahmad, who claimed that Picasso would have approved of his work being put on the line.

The remaining €11 million will be donated to the Alzheimer's Research Foundation.

The Foundation, which is organising the charity raffle, is based at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital,one of Paris's leading public hospitals, and claims to have become France's leading private funder of medical research into Alzheimer's disease since its creation in 2004.

The organisers said that the two previous Picasso tombolas had raised more than €10 million for cultural projects in Lebanon and water and sanitation programmes in Africa.

"Funding for research is derisory," said Olivier de Ladoucette, director of the foundation, on Tuesday. "In our developed societies, we still haven't understood that this is a major public health problem and that everyone needs to get involved.

"This Picasso initiative is one more stone in the edifice that will one day make Alzheimer's disease a thing of the past", he added.

Additional sources • AFP, AP