A Picasso 100 Euro Lottery

Picasso for 100 euros” is an original idea by TV host and producer Péri Cochin.

This raffle is open to participants on an international scale. Tickets, priced at 100 euros, can be bought on the website for the chance to win a Picasso painting entitled Nature Morte and contribute to a great charity project led by international NGO CARE.

“I was looking for an original fundraising idea to replace those boring gala dinners”

Péri Cochin

“When Peri Cochin first came to see us a few years ago, I immediately embraced her idea of an innovative, attractive charity raffle, using art to help others. I was really touched by the public’s enthusiasm for this initiative. A way for our family to continue Picasso’s own commitment to poorer populations and, in addition, offer more people the opportunity to discover his work”.

Claude Picasso

Aidez les Autres (Help Others) is a French initiative whose most recent philanthropic project aims to raise funds in order to build and rehabilitate wells, washing facilities and toilets in villages and schools in Cameroun, Madagascar and Morocco.

The initiative has been given a phenomenal boost by none other than legendary Picasso collector, David Nahmad, who has donated the artist’s Nature Morte 1921 work, not to be auctioned off, but offered to one lucky lottery ticket winner.

With only 200,000 tickets issued, 100 euro gives you a real (and shorter than the national lottery odds) chance to own an extremely valuable work of art, as well as do your own bit for philanthropy in action.

BBeyond had a conversation with David Nahmad, at his home in Monaco (the article will be published online as well as in print shortly, so watch this space!).

When we asked the pre-eminent and most important Picasso collector in the world what prompted him to donate the work, he says he was told of the charity’s initiative by two friends. Picasso himself, Nahmad says, would have wanted to support the project, which would have been close to his heart.  

Much research has gone into Nature Morte 1921 and is meticulously documented by the collector who is known for setting great stock by the history and narrative of every work of art he’s ever acquired. 

Below is an extract from the research paper, reproduced here with David Nahmad’s permission.

Painted in mid-1921 – a pivotal year in Picasso’s long and multi-faceted career – the present work Nature Morte is of particular interest for three principal reasons:

i) It represents a particularly strong example of Picasso’s still-lives painted in a Cubist vein during the early 1920s, a genre that the artist constantly sought to challenge by pushing and re-drawing the boundaries that had traditionally bound it for centuries;

ii) Completed on 20^th June 1921, as annotated in the top left-hand corner (“20-6-21”), Nature morte was painted in a year that bore great personal significance for the artist. On 4^th February 1921 – just a few months earlier – Picasso and his Russian wife Olga Khoklova had welcomed the arrival of their first son, Paulo, an event that quickly proved inspirational to the artist, as seen with his series of Neoclassical works dedicated to the mother and child theme. Nature morte was also painted a few months shy of another important milestone in the artist’s life: his 40^th birthday (25^th October 1921);

iii) The painting is accompanied by a particularly strong provenance and exhibition history, which, per se, is extraordinarily fascinating and involves several key protagonists of the European avant-garde artworld, especially those associated with the Surrealist movement, from the 1930s onwards, as will be detailed in due course.

Entitled Nature morte, this oil on canvas constitutes one of a number of still-lifes that Picasso painted in the early 1920s when he consciously chose to revise his pre-war Cubist investigations. Having recently emerged from the sobriety of the First World War, the artist began to paint blocks of pure colour accompanied by strong, powerful linear black shading, that emphasised the objects in terms of space and volume. In the present work, Picasso chose to combine both Cubist and natural elements, favouring bold linearity and angularity of forms over a decorative approach. It attests to his ongoing and exhaustive exploration of the genre in some of the most imaginative ways possible in early 20^th century art.