A Picasso for a hundred euros: there is a Christmas raffle where the grand prize is a painting by the great cubist

Who wants to take home an original painting by Pablo Picasso, worth a million euros, by spending only 100 euros? A French charity, Aider les autres (“Helping Others”), in collaboration with a U.S. NGO, Care International, and Succession Picasso, is launching the 1 Picasso pour 100 euros lottery: the first prize is an original Still Life by the great Spanish Cubist. The Christmas lottery, authorized by the French Ministry of the Interior through the prefecture of Paris, makes available a total of two hundred thousand tickets of 100 euros each: the proceeds will be used to start a project to build and restore wells and washing facilities in villages and schools in Cameroon, Madagascar, and Morocco. The intent is to make water access easier for two hundred thousand people: the estimated time for completion of the project is five years.

Each buyer can procure a maximum of thirty tickets, while larger orders require contacting the organizers. Tickets are purchased directly on the initiative’s website, https://1picasso100euros.com, and you do not need to be French to buy them: orders can come from all over the world. The draw will be made with a live online broadcast on January 6, 2020, and in case the winner cannot attend, he or she will receive notification of the win by email and by registered mail. In addition, the winning ticket number will be posted on the website. All costs involving shipping, insurance, customs and whatnot will be paid, in an amount up to 50 percent of the value of the painting, by Aider les autres.

The painting, a 1921 oil on canvas, is signed and dated in the upper left corner, and is guaranteed by a certificate of authenticity signed by Maya Widmaier-Picasso and Claude Ruiz-Picasso, heirs of the artist. The association Aider les autres purchased it from collector David Nahmad. It was also previously owned by the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, which displayed it in an exhibition in 1950.

The initiative is in its second year: the first one was held in 2013, and a watercolor by Picasso, L’homme au Gibus from 1914, also worth $1 million, was up for grabs. At the time, the work had been won by Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old U.S. citizen who was a project manager in a fire-plumbing company. The ticket had been drawn on Dec. 18, 2013, at Sotheby’s headquarters in Paris, and the proceeds of the venture (€4.8 million) had been donated to theInternational Association for the Preservation of Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city in what is now Lebanon and a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the goal was to build a 1,500-square-meter craft village on the outskirts of modern Tyre, to make it home to craft workshops so as to create jobs and promote economic development in the area. The construction took four years and the village was inaugurated on September 10, 2017 in the presence of Hervé de Charette, former foreign minister of France, and the French ambassador to Lebanon.

Aider les autres now aims to continue this initiative on an annual basis, each time in partnership with a different NGO.

Pictured: Pablo Picasso, Still Life (1921; oil on canvas, 22.9 x 45.7 cm)

A Picasso for a hundred euros: there is a Christmas raffle where the grand prize is a painting by the great cubist

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