Sometimes there is one Pablo Picasso only one lot away: The work “Stillleben, 1921” by the Spanish cubist was raffled off in Paris on Wednesday evening, as with a live broadcast of the auction house Christie’s was to be followed.
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The stake for the raffle: a lot worth 100 euros. The value of the picture: Around a million euros. An Italian woman who had received the winning ticket as a gift had a lot of luck in the electronic drawing.
According to the organizers, a total of more than 51,000 lots of € 100 were sold, thus generating € 5.1 million for projects run by the aid organization Care. Most of the tickets were bought by French people: they made up 29 percent of the participants, 21 percent came from the United States and 19 percent from Switzerland.
The organizers actually wanted to sell 200,000 lots, but the demand was lower than hoped. Care communications chief Emanuela Croce was nevertheless satisfied. “With more than five million, we have achieved an extraordinary result for a complicated action in difficult times,” she told AFP.
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One million for the former owner
The owner of the painting, the art collector David Nahmad, will receive one million euros, the rest of the proceeds will go to care projects in Africa. This should give 200,000 people in Madagascar, Cameroon and Morocco access to clean drinking water.
The raffle, which had already been planned for January, had been postponed to March because of initially moderate interest – then the corona crisis intervened.
The painting, currently still exhibited in the Picasso Museum in Paris, shows a geometric composition with a piece of newspaper and an absinthe glass. It is a picture from a time when Picasso “synthesized the realistic and cubist trends,” said museum director Laurent Le Bon. The work stimulates “thinking and dreaming”.
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