A French charity is testing an unusual fund-raising approach in the fine art world: raffling off a Picasso painting worth more than 1 million euros ($1.2 million) to one winner.
The raffle tickets are on sale for 100 euros each, and proceeds will go toward research into Alzheimer’s disease. The artwork to be won is Picasso’s 1941 portrait, “Tête de femme.”
Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, the charity hosting the raffle, was founded in 2004 and is France’s leading funder of Alzheimer’s research. The charity raises money for clinical research programs, funds doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships and promotes the sharing of research.
Péri Cochin, a French television producer, said in an interview on Wednesday that she came up with the idea for a raffle after having seen her mother use them at fund-raising events she hosted.
Ms. Cochin, who owns the business Waww La Table, a tableware company, said that instead of offering raffle tickets to a few hundred people, as is typical, she wanted to organize a raffle that was open to anyone in the world.
She tried to imagine what object or item would appeal to most people, and artwork by Picasso came to mind. Olivier Picasso, Pablo Picasso’s grandson and a childhood friend of hers, was on board, she said, and she reserved the 1941 painting from the Opera Gallery, which will be paid slightly under €1 million after the draw.
The goal, she said, is to sell 120,000 tickets, enough to cover the cost of the painting and raise some €11 million for Alzheimer’s research. If not enough tickets are sold to cover the cost of the painting, all participants will be reimbursed, she said.
Raffle tickets are being sold online. The draw will take place at Christie’s in Paris on April 14 at 6 p.m. local time.
Olivier Picasso said in an interview that the piece being raffled off, “Tête de femme,” was mostly likely painted in the same Paris studio where his grandfather painted his 1937 masterpiece “Guernica.”
Pablo Picasso painted “Tête de femme” in 1941, during the breakdown of his marriage to Olga Khokhlova, his first wife, a period that was “extremely complicated for my grandfather,” Olivier Picasso said. He added that the black, gray and brown colors in the piece reflected the unhappiness that his grandfather was experiencing at the time.
“Associating the name of Pablo Picasso to charity, a charitable purpose, is very important because my grandfather was very generous with the people around him,” he said.
Despite decades of research, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, the most commonly diagnosed form of dementia, and no treatment that can stop or reverse its progression.
Picasso paintings have been raffled for charity before, with the first such raffle taking place in 2013 and the second in 2020, raising a total of more than €10 million. The 2013 winner was Jeffrey Gonano, who at the age of 25 became the owner of a Picasso drawing valued at €860,000. The 2020 winner was Claudia Borgogno, an accountant from Ventimiglia, Italy, whose son had given her a raffle ticket for Christmas. She won a 1921 Picasso valued at €1 million.
Jenny Gross is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics.
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