Forget The Lottery; You Have Better Odds Of Winning This Picasso
Imagine buying a genuine Pablo Picasso painting valued at $1 million — and paying only $135.
That's the prize if you win the "1 Picasso For 100 Euros" raffle Sotheby's is currently putting on. It's the first time a Picasso has been offered as a raffle prize, and while 100 euros (about $135) isn't cheap for a raffle ticket, at one in about 50,000, your chances of winning are a lot better than the mega lotteries a lot of people enter.
Peri Cochin, a journalist and television producer in Paris, explains that the idea for an online raffle came about when she was faced with attending yet another gala charity dinner. She and her mother, who is Lebanese, plan fundraising events for the International Association to Save Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city in Lebanon. Tyre's monuments have suffered from Lebanon's civil wars, and the city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been damaged by urban blight. When Cochin's mother suggested the charity gala, Cochin thought: Not again.
"All those gala dinners," she says, "You go there, you sit and you are really bored very quickly, and you look to your watch and hope that 11 o'clock will arrive quickly and you can go home and be quiet and forget about that dinner."
Cochin wanted to try something new. They came up with the idea for an online raffle that would intrigue people from all over the world, not just the usual suspects at a charity dinner. Cochin knows Olivier Picasso, grandson of Pablo Picasso, who is also a television producer in Paris. Together, they looked for a Picasso drawing, and found Man with Opera Hat. Olivier Picasso, who is writing a biography of his grandfather, says the painting is from 1914, "the peak of the cubism period of my grandfather. It's the second part of the cubism history, when Pablo was more studying how to symbolize things than just to draw them. "
Fine Art
For Museum, Long-Lost Picasso Is Too Costly To Keep