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Floors carpeted in animal print, tables crawling with snakes and lanterns dancing with butterflies: the London home of 81-year-old art collector Pauline Karpidas was a surreal smorgasbord of art and objects. Chair arms morphed into golden swans, and a glass-topped coffee table played host to a copper cabbage propped up on chicken legs. Eyes and noses floated in paintings, hung three-high, by the likes of Warhol, Magritte and Picasso.
“It was literally like being hit in the solar plexus when you went in,” says Thomas Boyd-Bowman, a senior director and head of evening sales at Sotheby’s London. “Just mind-blowing, the quality of the pictures, the arrangement, the whole thing was extraordinary.” He is helping to bring the assemblage of Karpidas’s apartment, from which she recently moved, to auction: the two-day September event will feature 250 lots with a total estimate of more than £60mn, the highest price Sotheby’s has ever placed on a single-owner sale in Europe. Highlights include The Hour of the Angelus, by Leonora Carrington (estimate £600,000-£800,000), and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of Man Ray (£400,000-£600,000).
The collection was amassed by Karpidas and her late husband, the Greek shipping magnate Constantinos Karpidas, who died in 2005. It’s not the first time it has made headlines. In 2009, Karpidas sold the Andy Warhol painting 200 One Dollar Bills that they’d bought 23 years earlier for $383,000; it fetched $43.8mn at Sotheby’s New York. In 2023, the artworks from the couple’s home on the Greek island of Hydra were sold by Sotheby’s Paris for a total of €35,590,282 – more than double the high estimate.
Karpidas, who no longer gives interviews, has a somewhat fantastical life story. Born Pauline Parry to a working-class family in Manchester, she trained as a secretary, worked as a model, then moved to Athens in the 1960s and opened a fashion boutique called My Fair Lady. It was a prescient name: it was while she was working in the shop that she met her wealthy husband. In 1974, she had a chance encounter with Greek gallerist Alexander Iolas, who had “discovered” Andy Warhol and championed the surrealists. Using her considerable charm, she persuaded him to come out of retirement, and he became her adviser, introducing her to a circle of artists and dealers that would later expand from the New York art scene of the 1970s and ’80s to London’s YBA movement in the 1990s. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that she is of a lineage of great grande dame collectors like Peggy Guggenheim and Houston heiress Dominique de Menil,” says Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, who has worked closely with Karpidas over the past 25 years.
While the couple’s Hydra home was full of works by contemporary stars such as Nan Goldin and Tracey Emin, their two-storey apartment overlooking Hyde Park was populated by a roll call of 20th-century greats. “There’s an absolutely amazing Picabia of a pair of women on a sofa,” says Boyd-Bowman of Les Deux Amies, one of the artist’s “pin-up pictures” from the 1940s (£2.2mn-£2.8mn). Two Picasso sculptures, meanwhile, were bought from the artist’s granddaughter Marina (£300,000-£500,000 each).
But the top draw is the landmark grouping of surrealist work. “Pauline thinks like a surrealist,” says Barker. “She has a very whimsical kind of mind.” The sale includes Salvador Dalí drawings (from £150,000); paintings by Yves Tanguy (from £1mn-£1.5mn) and Dorothea Tanning (from £300,000); and a collection of Max Ernst sculptures (from £50,000). These pieces are coming to market at an auspicious moment, following the centenary last year of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. “Their value has risen hugely in the past few years alone,” says Boyd-Bowman.
Karpidas worked with interior designers Jacques Grange and Francis Sultana, and gallerist David Gill, on her homes, and her collection of design was structured around pieces by Mattia Bonetti, André Dubreuil and Les Lalanne, the French husband-and-wife duo. More than 60 works by the couple in the sale include a bronze daybed entwined in leaves and branches, on one of which an owl perches (£200,000-£300,000), which Karpidas had made up with a tiger-print cover. Jodi Pollack, Sotheby’s chairman and co-worldwide head of 20th-century design, has a personal favourite in the “delectable Choupatte”, the chicken-legged cabbage designed by Claude Lalanne. “Like many of these pieces, it’s unique, expressly commissioned for Pauline,” says Pollack.
Next month Sotheby’s New Bond Street HQ will bring the collection to public view, many pieces for the first time, in an exhibition. It offers a glimpse into the whimsical world of a collector who is “still buying art”, says Barker, “still supporting young new artists”. And one who knows that animal print goes with everything – Picassos included.
Pauline Karpidas: The London Collection is on view from 8 to 16 September. The auction will be held on 17 and 18 September at Sotheby’s New Bond Street, London