Claudia Borgogno, a resident of Ventimiglia, never thought she would be the lucky winner after her son gifted her a €100 raffle ticket he bought for €100. But, to her and everyone’s surprise, the ticket won her a Picasso painting worth $1.1 million.
1 Picasso 100 Euros is an operation organized by Aider Les Autres (Help the Others), a non-profit association that aims to raise funds from the public and distribute them to charitable organizations with operations on the ground. After the success of the first edition, the second one has just finished with Claudia winning the painting. “I have never won anything before,” she told Associated Press. Her son confirms that it was “maybe the best decision in my life.” Aider Les Autres works with the permission of the Picasso Administration and in partnership with the Picasso Estate.
The painting in question is an oil-on-canvas Nature Morte painted in 1921 by Pablo Picasso and was prior to the raffle housed at the Picasso Museum in Paris.
The second edition of Aider Les Autres and Picasso Estate raffle managed to raise €5.1 million (approximately $5.59 million) in total, from which the €900,000 ($990,000) will be given to Monaco-based billionaire collector David Nahmad, the current owner of the painting, and the remaining amount will be sent to The CARE Project, a program that aims to provide clean drinking water to villages and schools in Cameroon, Madagascar, and Morocco.