Win a $1 million Picasso for $135 in first-ever raffle

• Picasso painting is being raffled online to world instead of auctioned to elite
• Only 50%2C000 tickets but there are still some left
• Proceeds to help preserve ancient Phoenician city of Tyre in Lebanon

Feeling lucky? Get out your credit card and put down $135 for a ticket to win a $1 million Picasso painting.

Maybe you'll win it, maybe you won't but it's for a good cause: The proceeds of this first-ever online raffle of an artwork by Pablo Picasso will help save the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre in Lebanon, a UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site and one of the origin points of Western civilization.

"It would make a great gift for Christmas," say Olivier Widmaier Picasso, the artist's grandson. Picasso and his friend, French TV host Peri Cochin, came up with the idea 1Picasso100Euros.com.

No kidding. The painting, Man With Opera Hat, is a 1914 gouache from the artist's famous late Cubist period, and is worth at least $1 million. It's been authenticated by Picasso's daughter, Maya Picasso, 78, and his son, Claude Picasso, 66, who help run the Picasso family estate and foundation.

"It is beautiful and perfectly executed and the subject is a character," says Olivier Picasso, 52.

Moreover, he says, the painting is a precursor of an important later period in the artist's career when he worked with his friend French writer Jean Cocteau and Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev to create the costumes and sets for the ballet Parade.

There are still tickets left — limited to 50,000 total under French law — and still time to buy one for 100 Euros ($135). The drawing is Dec. 18 at Sotheby's in Paris. After the drawing, the painting will be delivered to the winner along with certificates of authentication.

Olivier Picasso, Maya's son (he goes by her last name), and Cochin are in New York this week with the painting to promote the raffle and the cause, which the artist (he died in 1973) would have supported, his grandson says.

"My grandfather was a pioneer in many ways, not only in his private love life but as a creator," he says.

Ordinarily, Picasso artworks that come on the market are auctioned, and often for nine-figure prices. Cochin wanted to try something different; plus, she says, she was tired of going to "boring" fundraising dinners for various causes, including her Lebanese mother's International Association to Save Tyre.

"When my mother said let's do another gala, I said oh no please don't do this again, it's always the same kind of people at the table, looking at their watches," she says. A raffle, known as a tombola in Europe, would "reach a wider target of people than usually, people who never heard of us before."

She enlisted her pal Olivier, a French TV producer and art consultant to his family's foundation, who was skeptical at first but then enthusiastic. The Picasso estate is waiving its usual fees for sale of Picasso artworks.

"It's very difficult to find the perfect Picasso for such a raffle," Olivier says. But Cochin found one (it was owned by one of Picasso's descendants) and acquired it for the Tyre charity.

If all 50,000 tickets are sold, it will raise about $7 million for projects at Tyre that will help preserve the site and provide jobs for Lebanese villages nearby, Cochin says.

Olivier says his family's foundation supports many causes but the Tyre project "is culturally and historically very important. It's beyond politics. (It's) protecting and showing how this Phoenician city was so important to so many things in Western civilization."

Olivier has been to the USA often but not his grandfather; when he tried to come in 1957 for a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, he was denied a visa by U.S. authorities because he was a Communist. But Americans, both art elites and ordinary art lovers, are embracing the Picasso raffle, he says.

"It's amazing to see people so happy to see a real Picasso (painting)," he says.

"And a real Picasso gentleman," adds Cochin.

"I'm just a little bonus," he laughs.