Dimitris Kouimtsidis
AN Italian woman has won a Picasso painting worth €1 million in a raffle.
The painting, titled Nature Morte was painted in 1921 in Paris and is an oil-on-canvas depiction of a newspaper alongside a glass of absinthe.
Claudia Borgogno from Ventimiglia, north-western Italy received the raffle ticket as a Christmas present from her son.
Borgogno summed up her amazement: “I have never won anything before.”
Her son Lorenzo Naso referred to it as the best decision he’s ever made in his life.
Neither Naso nor his mother had watched the raffle, in fact they didn’t even know when the draw was taking place.
“When I arrived and I told her she had won she was like: ‘Please don’t joke’,” he said.
The 51,140 tickets were sold for €100 each, with the proceeds going to provide water for villagers in Madagascar and Cameroon.
The draw was originally scheduled for March, but that was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Although organisers valued the painting at €1 million, the art collector who provided it, David Nahmad, claims it’s worth at least two or three times that.
Nahmad will be paid €900,000 for the work.
The painting was the smallest of 300 works by Picasso that he owns, the largest private collection of works by the Spanish artist.
The date and style of Nature Morte are reflective of a period in the artist’s career categorized as ‘Crystal’ or ‘Synthetic’ Cubism, defined by Tate Modern as a movement ‘about flattening out the image and sweeping away the last traces of allusion to three-dimensional space.’
