Just in time to assuage some of the 2025 charity tax deduction-guilt of the global 1%, at 6:00 p.m. Central European Summer Time on April 14 in Christie’s Paris rooms at 9 Avenue Matignon, the august and very imaginative administration of the Parisian charity Fondation Recherche Alzheimer (Foundation for Alzheimer Research) is staging a non-profit raffle of a Picasso to fund its research. The price for a raffle ticket is a flat 100 euros under the fetching title “1Picasso100Euros.” Give or take a penny on the exchange rate, the Fondation expects to raise some $17,000,000, with its 100,000-plus tickets, of which approximately $16 million will go to the charity and $1.1 million will go to the Paris-based international Opera Gallery, from whose collection the 1941 gouache of Dora Maar, Picasso’s seminal wartime muse (and arguably, of the many women in his life, his most infamously jealous mistress) is sourced.
Plainly put, if your tax adivsors have called you on the carpet to pad out your philanthropic donations for 2026’s ultra-wild Strait-of-Hormuz financial roller-coaster, do please buy a fistful of these raffle tickets. You’ve got nothing to lose and, theoretically anyway, a fine wartime Picasso goache to gain.
If you’re in Paris and are thinking of dropping by, the auction room is now chock full, Christie’s has announced, so we advise that you head to the Ritz’s Bar Hemingway, order a stiff Johnnie-Walker-Black on the rocks, and click on the hyperlink above to see if you’ve become a millionaire in the last few seconds. If so, buy everybody in the bar a round and tip generously, because this is your very own April-in-Paris evening to tell your grandchildren about.
This isn’t the Fondation’s first time around the raffle/philanthropy block with million-dollar Picassos as the very fetching bait. In fact, it’s the third time they’ve done it. Suffice it to say, the two previous winners have been extremely happy with their Picassos.
The evening April 14 raffle is, however, the first time that a piece from the war years — and more specifically, a piece whose subject is the fiery lover of and wartime collaborator with Picasso, Dora Maar — has been put up as the prize. So, a stroll back through Maar’s, and the war’s, extreme significance in Picasso’s life and work during this period is useful in putting the to-be-raffled goache of her in context, and in giving a more precise meaning to the actual (estimated) million-plus value of the work. Because: It is, at the very least, worth that.
Pictured below, the 2006 exhibition in Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria entitled “Love and War 1935-45,” featuring many of Picasso’s Dora Maar portraits and her own photography. The exhibition was curated by Anne Baldessari, then the director of Paris’ Musee Picasso.
Love And War 1935-45: A 2006 exhibition in Melbourne, Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria, curated by Anne Baldessari, then director of Paris’ Musee Picasso. The exhibition explored the personal and artistic relationship between Pablo Picasso and his lover and muse of those years, Dora Maar. The exhibition reveals intimacies of a dialogue between two highly charged artists at a time of romantic connection and as their romance unfolded, Picasso celebrated his love for Dora Maar in sensuous drawings, prints and paintings and in turn, Dora Maar celebrated the couple’s intimacy through exquisite photography.(WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
The Fondation Recherche Alzheimer’s April 14 raffle is, however, the first time that a piece from the war years — and more specifically, a piece whose subject is the fiery lover of and wartime collaborator with Picasso, Dora Maar — has been put up as the prize. So, a stroll back through her significance in Picasso’s life and work during this period is useful in putting the to-be-raffled gouache of her in context, and in giving a more precise meaning to the actual (estimated) million-plus value of the work.
To the man, then: Picasso in the war years of the German occupation of Paris remains a robust figure in the history of the city’s anti-Nazi cultural undergound. He’s pictured top in the decisive year 1944, during which August Paris was liberated from the Nazi occupation by the U.S. Army, having fought their way down from Normandy since D-Day in June, allied by this point with General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French forces, who entered Paris with them.
In this shot, Picasso leans out one of his grandly wrecked gabled windows of his two-floor attic studio at No. 7 Rue des Grands Augustins, on the Left Bank. That ramshackle but commodious 17th-century attic refuge became a significant node of cultural resistance in Vichy France — pretty much everybody who was anybody was dropping by for the anti-Nazi salon, and not least, the drinks. Having first arrived in Paris as a student in 1900 but having subsequently met with renown and success in the Roaring Twenties and onward, by 1940 Picasso could afford to stand his friends to a drink.
For their part in occupied Paris from 1940-44, the Nazis only honed their mania for politically classifying literally every human in Europe as a threat. Picasso was early and prominently listed as one of the premier “degenerate” artists, in the view of Deputy Reichsführer Hermann Göring and others whose responsibility was the confiscation of art and luxury items from their wealthier civilian victims.
Consequently, Picasso had his tussles with Paris’ Gestapo detachment. As a Spaniard, he was acutely aware of the horrors of fascism as represented by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and — most suspect to the Gestapo, anyway — in 1937 he painted his monumental cubist antiwar horror/dystopian work based on the 1935 Spanish fascist massacre of civilians at Guernica. The point is, in the Paris Gestapo’s view, Picasso was a very bad boy. Not bad enough to lock up, perhaps, but bad nonetheless.
His ferocious photographer-mistress and muse, Dora Maar was with the artist for every step of that and more. As the war deepened and the Wehrmacht stranglehold inexorably tightened on Parisian social and cultural life, the artist and his muse turned inward, to home rather than to cafes, which is to say, the circle of artistic friends, those that were not already in exile, detention or in the extermination camps, moved indoors. For the pair, “home” was No. 7 Rue des Augustins.
In the largest artistic sense, Picasso poured himself into mapping the landscape of his relationship with Maar — as he had done with earlier companions and would go on to do with others — in the monumental, overridingly, earth-shatteringly abstract and yet curiously uplifting portraits of Dora Maar. But the canvasses and studies of Maar — of which the current gouache is a stellar small-portrait example — stand out because they’re imbued with the unmistakably grim backdrop of the war and the occupation of France. Little of the war is overtly stated — Picasso was not the man for that. But the war generated an enormously dark, violent stage and proscenium, so to speak, that surrounds and supports every portrait of Dora Maar.
Pictured below, the late Berlin-born Parisian gallerist and renowned Picasso collector Heinz Berggruen — who escaped the Nazis to the States and who, along with other wartime emigres, joined the U.S. Army — became friends with and a collector of Picasso and Matisse postwar. Pictured below with arguably one of the most riveting Dora Maar oils, “Dora Maar aux ongles verts” (Dora Maar with green nails) which hangs as a centerpiece of Berlin’s Museum Berggruen, which houses his Picasso-, and Matisse-studded modern collection.
Paris, FRANCE: German art collector Heinz Berggruen poses in front of Pablo Picasso’s “Dora Maar aux ongles verts”, 15 September 2006 at the Picasso museum that will present from 20 September to 08 January 2007 an exhibition of his collection. Berggruen went to Paris and became one of the city’s leading art dealers for almost 50 years, trading mostly Picassos. AFP PHOTO / JACQUES DEMARTHON (Photo credit should read JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
The prices for monumental portraits of Maar have only risen over the decades, of course. Pictured below, “Tete de Femme, (La Lectrice — Dora Maar)” an oil painted in 1938 — the year after Picasso painted “Guernica,” and two years before the German occupation — shortly before its London auction by Sotheby’s in 2008, at which it sold for $14,641,911.
Sotheby’s employees hold a painting entitled Tete de Femme (La Lectrice – Dora Maar),1938, by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 29 January 2008, at the Sothebys auction house impressionist and modern art sale in London . The painting is expected to fetch an estimated 2.5-8.5 million GBP ( 13-17 million USD or 3.3-11.5 million Euros) when it is auctioned on 5 Febuary 2008 in London. AFP PHOTO/SHAUN CURRY (Photo credit should read SHAUN CURRY/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Two years prior to that, in May 2006, Sotheby’s auction “Dora Maar aux chat” (Dora Maar with a cat), sold for a record $85 million in New York. Pictured below, Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer in the heat of the action recognizes a buyer on the floor.
New York, UNITED STATES: Pablo Picasso’s ” Dora Maar au chat” is auctioned by Tobias Meyer at Sotheby’s New York during the Impressionist and Modern Art Sale 03 May 2006. The painting sold for USD 85 million. AFP PHOTO/Timothy A. CLARY (Photo credit should read TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Bottom line, despite your rather skinny 1-in-120,000 chances offered by any single ticket for what is sure to be this evening’s extremely entertaining Fondation Recherche Alzheimer raffle in Paris, it’s still a massively good play for the negligible price of a moderate meal out for two.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com