A French engineer has scored a $1 million Pablo Picasso painting for a mere $116. How? He’d entered an unusual raffle hosted by a French charity seeking to raise money for research into Alzheimer’s disease.

The April 14 raffle at Christie’s Paris offered tickets priced at €100 ($116) each, with one lucky winner getting to take home Tête de Femme, a 1941 painting by Picasso that depicts a distorted woman’s head in ashen tones. According to the organizers, 120,000 tickets were sold, generating €12 million ($14 million) for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, around €1 million ($1.1 million) of which will go towards Opera Gallery from whose collection Tête de Femme comes.

The 58-year-old Ari Hodara had bought his winning ticket days before the close of the raffle. Upon receiving a call informing him of his win, Hodara was so taken back he thought he was being hoaxed. As to his plans for the painting, he said, “First, I will tell the news to my wife, who has yet to return from work. And at first, I think I’ll take advantage of it and keep it.”

This initiative is the vision of Péri Cochin, a French television producer, who was inspired more than a decade ago by the fundraising events her mother used to host. Rather than offering tickets to a select few, however, Cochin has leveraged the power of the internet to open her Picasso raffles up to anyone in the world. After first approaching the Picasso family foundation, with which Cochin has close ties, in the 2010s, she received its full support.

Peri Cochin presents the Pablo Picasso work during “1 Picasso For 100 euros” draw in Paris on April 14, 2026. Photo: Foc Kan / WireImage.

“When Péri Cochin first approached us, I immediately embraced her idea of a charity raffle, both original and compelling, placing art at the service of others,” Claude Picasso, the artist’s son who died in 2023, previously said. “The public’s enthusiasm deeply moved me: it’s a way to further Picasso’s own lifelong commitment to the most vulnerable.”

The Alzheimer’s Research Foundation was founded in 2004 and is France’s leading funder of research into Alzheimer’s, the most commonly diagnosed form of dementia that despite decades of research remains without cure. The foundation funds clinical research programs as well as postgraduate fellowships, and has said that following the raffle it will launch a major callout for research programs across Europe, the U.S., and Canada.

Pablo Picasso at his home and studio in Mougins, south of France, 1971. Photo: Raph Gatti / AFP via Getty Images.

The offering of Tête de Femme marks Cochin’s third Picasso raffle. In 2013, L’Homme au Gibus, a cubist Picasso drawing from 1914, raised €5 million ($5.8 million) to safeguard Tyre, a UNESCO World Heritage city in Lebanon, and build an artisanal village. The winner was a 25-year-old man from Pennsylvania.

A second edition in 2020 presented Nature Morte (1921), a flat still life of a glass of absinthe and a newspaper on a table. It raised a further €5 million, this time for CARE, which used the funds to support clean water and hygiene programs in Africa. The winner was an accountant from Northern Italy whose son had given her a raffle ticket for Christmas.

This story was originally published on December 10, 2025. It was updated on April 16, 2026, at 11.10 a.m. ET, to reflect the outcome of the raffle.