Earlier this year, the not-for-profit Aider les Autres, based in Paris, organised a charitable raffle with a valuable Pablo Picasso still life as the winning prize. Tickets for the chance to win the Picasso were sold for €100 (£90) each.
Postponed several times because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the draw finally took place on Wednesday, 20 May at Christie's Paris. The winning ticket belonged to Claudia Borgogno, a 58-year-old Italian woman who was given the ticket by her son for Christmas. "I have never won anything before," she told The Associated Press.
Borgogno is now the new owner of Nature Morte, an abstract still life from 1921 of a newspaper next to a glass of absinthe. The composition comes from the painter's so-called 'synthetic' Cubist period, defined by the Tate Modern as a movement "aimed at flattening the image and sweeping away the last traces of three-dimensional space." The organisers estimated the value of the work at €1 million (£900,000).
The proceeds of the raffles will be donated to CARE, an organisation which provides access to drinking water and education in African countries, such as Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco. In total, 51,140 tickets were sold online in more than 100 different countries, with the most sold in France, the United States, Switzerland and Italy.
Read also: Inside the Battle to Save Picasso's Murals in Oslo
The donations collected amount to more than €5.1 million (£4.6 mil), making the net profit €4.2 million (£3.8 mil). David Nahmad, the owner of the canvas, sold the canvas to the non-profit for €900,000 (and donated €100,000 himself), but said the work was worth "at least two, three times" more. Still Life was the smallest of the 300 works by Picasso in his collection, which is the largest private collection of works by the Spanish artist.
"It may have been the best decision of my life," Lorenzo Naso, the winner's son who was staying with his mother in Italy, told the Guardian. "It was a pretty horrible time for us during this lockdown and now it's great news."
It's not the first time that the association Aider les Autres has raised money with a Picasso. The first iteration of this charitable raffle dates to 2013. The raffle then was won by Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old American who received Picasso's L'Homme au Gibus, a gouache drawing from 1914, worth about £820,000.
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