15 April 2026 , 14:23
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A Parisian art enthusiast was amazed by his fortune when he discovered on Tuesday that he had won a Pablo Picasso painting valued at more than €1 million with a €100 raffle ticket.
“How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” said Ari Hodara, 58, after organizers contacted him following the draw at Christie’s auction house in the French capital.
Hodara described himself as an art amateur with a fondness for Picasso and mentioned that he purchased his ticket over the weekend after learning about the charity raffle by chance during a meal at a restaurant.
“First, I will share the news with my wife, who has not yet returned from work,” said Hodara, a sales engineer. “Initially, I think I’ll enjoy it and keep it.”
The third edition of the “1 Picasso for €100” lottery, benefiting Alzheimer’s research, featured Picasso’s Head of a Woman, a 1941 portrait of the artist’s longtime muse and partner Dora Maar.
Organizers stated that all 120,000 tickets had been sold, raising €12 million (£10.4 million), with €1 million going to the Opera Gallery, an international art dealership that owned the painting. Gilles Dyan, the gallery founder, noted that he had offered a preferential price for the painting, with the public price being €1.45 million.
In the first raffle, in 2013, a Pennsylvania man working at a fire-sprinkler business won Man in the Opera Hat, which the Spanish master painted in 1914 during his cubist period.
In 2020, the oil-on-canvas Still Life was won by Claudia Borgogno, an accountant in Italy whose son had gifted her the ticket as a Christmas present.
Head of Investigations