Have $117 to Spend? You Could Win a Picasso Painting Worth More Than $1 Million
A moody 1941 portrait of a woman by the Spanish artist will be given to the winner of a charity raffle that’s being staged to fund Alzheimer’s research
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Tête de femme, a Picasso painting worth more than $1 million, could be yours for roughly $117.
The portrait is being raffled on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, a French charity aiming to fund research into the progressive brain disorder, which does not have a known cure. It’s the third edition of the international raffle, which offers a painting by Pablo Picasso, one of the 20th-century’s most influential artists, to one lucky raffle ticket holder for a charitable cause.
Tête de femme (Head of a Woman) is a 1941 portrait of a woman painted during a period that was “extremely complicated” for the Spanish artist, his grandson Olivier Picasso tells the New York Times’ Jenny Gross. Picasso most likely painted it in the same Paris studio where he created Guernica, his monumental 1937 anti-war canvas.
Fun fact: How big is Guernica?
Picasso’s large-scale canvas, inspired by a bombing during the Spanish Civil War, is 25.5 feet long and 11.5 feet tall.
The portrait being raffled is an abstracted interpretation of a woman’s face featuring curved brushstrokes. The painting’s dominant black and gray colors mirrored Picasso’s unhappiness, his grandson tells the Times. At the time, the artist was separating from his first wife, Olga Khokhlova.
The Alzheimer’s Research Foundation hopes the moody painting will generate enough interest to sell 120,000 tickets. Priced at €100 (around $117) each, the raffle could raise nearly $13 million for Alzheimer’s research after covering the cost of the painting. (The Opera Gallery, which owns the painting, will be paid slightly less than €1 million for the painting after the draw, per the Times.)
Tickets are being sold exclusively on the foundation’s website. The raffle will be held by Christie’s in Paris on April 14, 2026.
The event is organized by French television host Péri Cochin, who was inspired by her mother’s fundraising events, per Artnet’s Richard Whiddington. In the 2010s, she received full support from the Picasso family foundation.
The first raffle took place in 2013. Picasso’s L’Homme au Gibus raised around €5 million ($5.8 million) to protect Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city in Lebanon. The winner was Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old man from Pennsylvania.
“I’m still in shock. It’s still very odd,” Gonano told the Tribune-Review’s Michael Hasch in 2013. “I never thought I would win. I just saw a news article on Yahoo and bought a ticket. I don’t even know why.”/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/18/04/18047f0d-9c86-4a00-9ae9-3b17173c3dee/pf-b21ee807-5933-45d8-9324-61d98f443af3-tableauhr.png)
A second raffle, in 2020, raised another €5 million for CARE, which runs clean water and hygiene programs across Africa. The prize was Nature Morte, a 1921 Picasso painting depicting a newspaper and a glass of absinthe. The winner was Claudia Borgogno, a 58-year-old Italian woman whose son bought her a raffle ticket. “It was maybe the best decision in my life,” her son, Lorenzo Naso, told the Associated Press’ John Leicester in 2020.
Olivier Picasso tells the Times that the raffle is an important way to honor his grandfather.
“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 says.