Want to Win a £1 Million Picasso? This Charity is Raffling Off £100 Lottery Tickets for a Shot at the Big Prize

An original painting by Pablo
Picasso valued at a cool €1
million ($1,113,735) could be yours for
just €100.

The Paris-based non-profit Aider
les Autres (translated from French as “Help the Others”) is hosting
an international raffle, dubbed “1 Picasso for 100 Euros,” in which
members of the public can purchase a €100 (roughly $111) ticket in hopes of acquiring a still-life by
the Spanish master. Those playing their luck have a 1-in-200,000
chance of winning the coveted work.

The 1921 painting, titled
Nature
Morte, is an
oil-on-canvas depiction of a newspaper alongside a glass of
absinthe. The date and style are reflective of a period in the
artist’s career categorized as “Crystal” or “Synthetic” Cubism,
defined by Tate Modern as a movement “about flattening out the
image and sweeping away the last traces of allusion to
three-dimensional space.”

Currently on view at the Picasso
Museum in Paris, Nature
Morte is signed and
dated by the artist and is supported by two certificates of
authenticity, respectively signed by two of his children, Maya
Widmaier-Picasso and Claude Ruiz-Picasso. At the moment, it belongs
to collector David Nahmad—arguably considered to be the owner of
the largest collection of Picasso works in the world—from whom
Aider les Austres will purchase the work for the raffle.

The organization says the cost
of the acquisition will be recovered through ticket sales, with the
remainder of the raised funds going towards CARE International for
the rehabilitation of schools and supplies of clean water in
Cameroun, Madagascar, and Morocco.

This isn’t the first time the
non-profit has run a lottery-style Picasso giveaway. They staged
the first iteration of the project in 2013. That year’s winner was
Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old American fire-safety official from
Pennsylvania. He now owns Picasso’s L’Homme au Gibus, a 1914 gouache-on-paper drawing. At the time
of the raffle in 2013, the estimated worth of the drawing was also
$1 million.

This edition’s drawing will take
place on January 6, 2020 in Paris, under the supervision of a court
officer. Aider les Autres
now plans on continuing their quirky fundraising concept on an
annual basis, with the proceeds going towards a different
non-profit organization each year.

If you’re feeling lucky, tickets can be purchased here.

The post Want to Win a £1 Million Picasso? This Charity is
Raffling Off £100 Lottery Tickets for a Shot at the Big Prize
appeared first on artnet News.