Own a PIcasso for $135

The NY Times is reporting that grandson of Picasso will be raffling a 1914 Picasso gouache "Man With Opera Hat" for $135 per ticket.  The painting is valued at $1 million.  Olivier Picasso hopes to sell 50,000 tickets in order to fund raise for a UNESCO World Heritage project.  According to the report, over 40,000 tickets have already been sold.  The winner will be selected at Sotheby's showroom in Paris on December 18.

The NY Times reports

A bit of almost century-old Picasso will be coming to New York next month, and someone could end up owning it for only $135.

Olivier Widmaier Picasso, one of the artist’s grandsons, will visit the city in early December with a 1914 Picasso gouache, “Man With Opera Hat,” to promote an unusual raffle of the work for a fund-raising project to benefit the International Association to Save Tyre, the Lebanese city, a UNESCO World Heritage site whose history goes back to ancient Phoenicia. He says that the money, to be raised through selling 50,000 raffle tickets for 100 euros, or about $135, will go to support two cultural initiatives – the creation of an arts center and a scholarly institute – in the city, which has been badly damaged in military conflicts over the past several decades.

The raffle will be held at Sotheby’s in Paris on Dec. 18. Mr. Picasso and the Tyre association say the market value of the small cubist painting, which the association bought from a New York gallery, is about $1 million.

In a phone interview Friday from Paris, Mr. Picasso said that more than 40,000 raffle tickets had already been sold. “This was very important to me because this city is one of the places where the idea of Western civilization originated,” he said. “I think my grandfather would have been seduced by the idea of helping such a place.”

Source: The NY Times