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From Surrealism to Pop: Pauline Karpidas and Alexander Iolas
Famed gallerist Alexander Iolas taught Pauline Karpidas to look, to read, to understand – and over decades she turned that education into a collection of remarkable breadth and daring.
P auline Karpidas belongs to the last of the 20th century’s indomitable fellowship of Grande Dames – women whose deep commitment and influential patronage fundamentally shaped the way art is collected, exhibited and appreciated today. From Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim, to São Schlumberger and Dominique de Menil, Pauline’s name bookends a chronicle of art world bohemia in which high-society tradition blended with avant-garde radicality. A heady mix of artists, gallerists, intellectuals, patrons and socialites brought forth a mythology characterised by theatrical personalities, glamourous soirées and notorious encounters. Gertude Stein’s cerebral salons of the 1920s, Peggy Guggenheim’s unconventional lifestyle and patronage of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, Sau Schlumberger’s extravagant parties of the 1960s, and Dominique de Menil’s intellectual dedication and steadfast philanthropy, all constitute moments in a vital story that Pauline Karpidas would become an indelible part of.
In many ways, Pauline’s important contribution forms the final act in this bohemian tale of 20th-century art history. A key figure within this story, and the single biggest influence for Pauline, was the flamboyant and keenly astute dealer Alexander Iolas. It was their meeting in 1974 at Iolas’s Athenian mansion that ignited a life dedicated to art, beauty and philosophy; the beginning of what Pauline would describe to me as her “beautiful journey.” From modest means came grand accomplishments: Pauline’s story is an extraordinary tale of transformation. With Iolas playing fairy godmother, it is the art world’s answer to the classic Cinderella fairytale.
From Manchester to My Fair Lady
Born Pauline Parry in 1942 to a working class family in Manchester, Pauline’s upbringing was one of humble beginnings and hard graft. When her father became unable to work owing to epilepsy, her mother took on the role of principal breadwinner as an early-morning cleaner. By the age of 12 Pauline had started working odd jobs at the local market, and by 15 she had enrolled in secretarial school for a local timber merchants. With an industrious attitude and a vivacious, theatrical personality – she was constantly singing at work and even played Eliza Doolittle in a local youth production – Pauline became an office PA at 18 and began modelling at 19: an early career that jump-started an abiding love affair with travel and fashion. In her 20s, driven by an ever-pervasive entrepreneurial spirit, she began running a clothes boutique in Athens. The shop was named My Fair Lady (after Pauline’s longtime affinity with Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza) and it was here that Pauline would meet her future husband, Constantinos Karpidas.
Constantinos Karpidas (known to everyone as Dinos) was a highly successful engineer from a middle class family of Greek engineers and merchants. An eccentric character with a keen intellectual wit and poetic sensibility, Dinos belonged to the new jet-set; an international circle where aristocratic tradition met the avant-garde. Pauline’s own artistic nature and innate vivacity saw her flourish amongst this creatively inclined and well-heeled crowd. With great consequence, it was this milieu that brought Pauline and Dinos into the orbit of the notoriously outré and gifted art dealer, Alexander Iolas.
With his furs and fondness for provocative costume, Iolas was a sartorial spectacle whose natural proclivity as a performer commanded the attention of everyone around him.
With his furs and fondness for provocative costume, Iolas was a sartorial spectacle whose natural proclivity as a performer commanded the attention of everyone around him. He could hold court in five languages and cast an entire salon under his spell; he knew everybody who was anybody, and was as wonderfully chaotic and mercurial as he was charismatic and brilliant. Indeed, Iolas’s theatricality was only equal in measure to the scrupulous conviction with which he supported his artists and the generosity he showed his exclusive coterie of loyal friends and collectors. Boasting a ledger that ran the gamut of great 20th-century art from Picasso, Ernst, Magritte and Dali, to Les Lalanne, Fontana, Ruscha, Rauschenberg and Warhol, Iolas’s legacy today places him as the most important art dealer of the second half of the 20th century. It is no exaggeration to say that it was his undeniable influence that charmed the Karpidas Collection into being.
Iolas was born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria to wealthy Greek parents. Alexandria of the fin de siècle was a place of fabled cosmopolitan sophistication and a poetic cultural heritage; a fitting origin-story for an individual who welcomed drama of mythological proportion and embodied exotic cultural fluency. The son of prosperous cotton-merchants, Iolas spurned the family business and instead went on to enjoy a highly successful first career as a ballet dancer in both Europe and America. It was not until the mid-1940s that Iolas came to art in a second act that was even more brilliant than the first.
In 1945 the Hugo Gallery opened in New York – later renamed Alexander Iolas Gallery – and from here Iolas established an exceptional reputation with exhibitions of the European avant-garde. Surrealism was Iolas’s first great love; taking on the mantle after Julien Levy – the eminent dealer who introduced New York to the Surrealists in the 1930s – Iolas staged an extraordinary programme, showcasing work by the Surrealist greats Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Dorothea Tanning, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Victor Brauner and Leonor Fini, among many others. With the art world’s good and great at his fingertips, Iolas had a hand in forming many of the most important private art collections of the 20th century. It was through Iolas that Dominique de Menil, no less, developed her great eye as a collector. Tellingly, the aforementioned roll-call reads as a star-studded framework that is today reflected in the masterpieces on view at The Menil Collection in Houston; a list and level of quality that would moreover come to form the core of Pauline’s own collection. By the time Pauline and Dinos had properly befriended him in the mid-1970s, Iolas had spent almost three decades building collections and cementing the careers of so many major artists via an ever expanding trans-Atlantic fleet of galleries from Paris and New York, to Geneva, Milan, Madrid and Athens. Decades before Larry Gagosian launched his gallery empire, Iolas had already established the model.
Iolas did not so much consider himself an “art dealer” in the sense of chasing monetary success through art trades (though his opulent lifestyle would suggest otherwise); he was driven instead by an utter belief in, and passion for, the work of his artists. This was a principle he also applied to his collectors: Iolas selected his clients on the basis of their character, not the depth of their pockets. In 1965 for Paris Vogue, Iolas described this very attitude to art historian Maurice Rheims:
“I am not an art dealer just to sell paintings. My collectors are friends, friends that I make fall in love with what I do, with what I see. … I think all of my friends have a divine je ne sais quoi about them that attracts me to them. They have something of me, something that plays into my culture. I adore people that have the sublime, the divine about them. … Only those who are gifted with a poetic sensibility are my friends; I love to be around them because they carry the poetry of the world with them. What I want in life, because now I no longer want to dance, is to bring poetry through my paintings. Earning money, that’s not my goal. I believe in the preponderance of the spirit.”
Alexander Iolas’s Influence
By the mid 1970s, having already achieved so much, the tenured gallerist was in the process of winding down his activities. After almost 30 years spent on the go between his galleries in New York and Europe, Iolas looked to “return” to Greece and retire at his newly completed vast marble mansion built on family land just outside of Athens. That Iolas effectively brought himself out of retirement for Pauline and Dinos is a true testament to the kindred spirit of their relationship and the seriousness of Pauline’s ambitions. Dinos first met Iolas at a cocktail party in 1973; however, it was one year later, when Iolas was introduced to Pauline for the very first time, that the beginning of a great friendship, mentorship and collaboration truly began. Pauline’s memory of that first meeting is marked both by eccentricity and a sincere resolve at the prospect of putting a collection together. Explaining her first impressions of Iolas at his mansion in Agia Paraskevi, Pauline recalled:
“As I walked in, I just could not believe my eyes, this whole baronial hall was filled with all the great masterpieces, and I had no idea who they were; it was Max Ernst, Tanguy, Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray, Yves Klein, all the greats, and I just said wow! … The next morning, I got in the car and went running round, and there he was, having his hair dyed, along with his sort of houseboy who was just five foot tall. … I said to Iolas ‘Get up, we have to talk.’ And he asked ‘We have to talk?’ and he made this wonderful flick of his white towel that turned it into a sort of Turkish turban. … So that was the start of a great journey with a great mentor; he was the one who said, ‘You must train your eye, you must visit every museum in every city, you must read and understand about the twentieth century.’ … As Iolas said to Dinos, it will take ten years to put 10 masterpieces together. And it did take 10 years to put those 10 masterpieces together. … It wasn’t just about buying a work of art instantly. Instead you discovered it, you pondered on it, you asked questions about it. … As Iolas said to me, ‘You know, I don’t get out of bed to buy one painting.’”
And that he did not: together they would assemble an extraordinarily broad yet intrinsically linked compendium of outstanding pieces via the most important dealers, galleries and auctions of the day.
Her hair transformed into a veil of leaves, Pauline is both Daphne in metamorphosis and Athena the sage – a mythological embodiment of both transformation and wisdom.
Pauline and Dinos became part of art world high-society: alongside Iolas they mixed with a host of influential characters from artists, gallerists and intellectuals to socialites, philanthropists and aristocrats. There was Pierre Matisse and his wife Teeny Duchamp, Max Ernst and Bill Copley, Edward James and John Richardson, Jan Krugier and Paloma Picasso, Nan Kempner and Sao Schlumberger; they met Peggy Guggenheim and Dominique de Menil; were well acquainted with Andy Warhol and his Factory stalwarts Fred Hughes and Bob Colacello; and became great personal friends with Les Lalanne and Iolas’s righthand man Andrė Morgues who encouraged Pauline to wear couture and introduced her to Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Under Iolas’s instruction Pauline attended the right events, set to work devouring books on art and philosophy, and saw every major exhibition. For Pauline, it was the beginning of a great schooling that would last a lifetime.
Aside from the collection itself, nowhere is this intellectual journey more evident than in the stacked shelves of Pauline’s library at The Lancasters in London. A veritable wunderkammer of art objects sat nestled amongst important tomes spanning philosophy, psychoanalysis and art history; books that show signs of wear and tear, read cover-to-cover in support of a truly intellectual life. Sat amongst these books for many years, Claude Lalanne’s copper bust of Pauline provided an ever-meditative presence. Bearing an expression of repose and calm, Pauline’s eyes are closed and peaceful as though immersed in a dream; with her hair transformed into a veil of leaves, she is both Daphne in metamorphosis and Athena the sage – a mythological embodiment of both transformation and wisdom.
The Auction Years: Building Provenance and Prestige
The very sagacity that brought the collection into being – this mixture of dedication, trust in Iolas and an innate eye for quality – is no less underscored by the rich history that accompanies nearly every piece. To this end, not only did Iolas oversee acquisitions directly from artists or via notable dealers, he also encouraged Pauline and Dinos to look to auction. With the economic boom of the 1980s came the first great spike in the art market. The value of important masterpieces began its steep ascent, and in turn, major 20th-century works of art were beginning to come to auction. Ever with his finger on the pulse, Iolas directed Pauline to the salesrooms of Sotheby’s and Christie’s as they presided over once-in-a-lifetime presentations of critically important private collections and estates. It was at the former in 1975 that Pauline made a lasting impression on the great Sotheby’s expert Michel Strauss. In his memoirs, Strauss recalled their meeting with great fondness and in some detail; as the following words convey, this was the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime:
“One afternoon I happened to be in the gallery when a young woman came in from the street, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and asked whether she could see the pictures as she had just read about the sale in the press. She introduced herself as Pauline Parry and I was, of course, delighted to show them to her, influenced in part by the fact that she was a very pretty and friendly girl. I could see that she loved looking at them and hearing some of the stories I was telling her about the collection. As she was leaving the building she asked if she could have two tickets for the sale. My immediate thought was that as so many people were going to want to attend and seating was limited in the saleroom, I couldn’t just hand out tickets to pretty girls who took my fancy. I mumbled something noncommittal and to fob her off, asked her where the tickets should be delivered when they became available on the day before the sale. To my surprise she gave as an address 5 Grosvenor Square. Intrigued, I gladly sent her the tickets. She turned up for the sale looking very glamorous in evening dress and magnificent diamonds, accompanied by an older man. They proceeded to buy two of the lots: a Camille Pissarro of a peasant woman and her child sitting in an orchard for £65,000 and a beautiful painting by Edgar Degas of two dancers in bright yellow tutus waiting in the wings to come on stage which they bought for £100,000.
“A few years later Pauline married Dinos Karpidas, her companion at the Kahn-Sriber sale. He had already been buying some important works from his friend and fellow Greek, Alexander lolas, the famous, flamboyant dealer of Surrealism and the painter René Magritte in particular. Iolas had sold him several important late paintings by Picasso in the early 1970s at a time when few people understood the importance of the late work. Pauline soon plunged herself into that world and, with all the passion and knowledge she could muster, she subsequently became one of the great collectors of Picasso, Surrealism and cutting-edge contemporary art.”
As Strauss recalls, Pauline and Dinos became a force to be reckoned with on the auction circuit, and, over the course of the next two decades, they would play a crucial role in some of the most prestigious events in auction history. Offered on November 5, 1979 at Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, NY, The William N. Copley Collection presented the largest private assemblage of Surrealist art in American hands. Bill Copley (whose artistic moniker was CPLY) was a New York born artist, gallerist, writer and patron who amassed a substantial collection via his association with the Surrealists. For the Sotheby’s sale, Copley parted with a majority of the works he had acquired between 1947 and the mid-1970s in a record-breaking auction that, at the time, achieved the highest total on record for a private collection sale in the United States. It was from this sale that Yves Tanguy’s Paysage au nuage rouge, Giorgio de Chirco’s La Guerra and Max Ernst’s Portrait d’Appollinaire were crucially acquired.
Following Copley, Pauline truly immersed herself in the world of auction. In 1981, in a feat of saleroom bravery and nerve, Dalí’s Surrealist icon Le Sommeil became a cornerstone of the Karpidas Collection. This painting – among the most famous and important artworks of the Surrealist movement – first belonged to the poet, esteemed Surrealist advocate and patron, Edward James (1907-84). In 1981 when James’s collection was presented at Christie’s London, this painting graced the sale catalogue’s front cover. As soon as this masterpiece arrived on the auction block on the evening of March 30, a fierce bidding war ensued. The National Galleries of Scotland competed strongly for the painting, however, it was the Karpidas’ who won the battle that night and this Surrealist treasure remained with Pauline for many years in London. Dalí’s Messanger dans un paysage palladien of 1936 – with its playful gilt frame encasing an ink drawing on pink paper – also originated from the same collection: this piece had resided in James’s bedroom at the Surrealist-inspired gesamtkunstwerk of Monkton House, a hunting lodge in West Dean renovated under the auspices of Dalí himself.
The Karpidas’s participation as auction buyers would continue with aplomb over the next decade or so. In reviewing the provenance of each piece, the collection as a whole represents a who’s who of the first major single-owner collection auctions in art market history. Picasso’s Violon was acquired from the Andre Meyer sale (Sotheby’s New York, November 1980); four works on paper by Max Ernst and Man Ray came from the single owner sale of the great Surrealist dealer Julien Levy (Sotheby’s New York, November 1981); Wols’s Vert Strié Noir Rouge came from the Hélène Anavi Collection sale (Sotheby’s London, March 1984); René Magritte’s Tête hailed from Sotheby’s sale of the artist’s studio contents (Sotheby’s London, July 1987); and Victor Brauner’s Nous sommes trahis was bought from the André Breton Collection (Hôtel Drouot, Paris 2003). These are but a handful of examples. Such is the calibre of this collection that almost every work’s provenance lists a rich history of names from Leo and Gertrude Stein, André-Francois Petit and Barnet Hodes, through to Marcel Jean, Kay Sage Tanguy and Roland Penrose. Following discerning advice from Iolas, these pieces were not only acquired for their artistic merit, but also for the lives lived by the artworks themselves.
Surrealism, Its Afterlives and a Friendship with Andy Warhol
As the collection grew, Pauline became increasingly confident and her interests more mercurial and broad. At the same time as acquiring works by Magritte, Ernst, Tanguy and Dalí, Pauline and Dinos began to seek pieces by pioneering artists of the next generation. To this point, not only was Iolas the great dealer of late Surrealism, he also had a keen eye for the most cutting edge and daring developments in post-war and contemporary art. Alongside exhibitions of earlier twentieth century masters, Iolas staged formative shows of Wols, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Joseph Beuys, Pino Pascali, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle and Les Lalanne across his trans-Atlantic gallery empire.
For Pauline, Iolas’s keen direction and broad remit laid the groundwork for a masterfully fluid dialogue in which the full-flowering of Surrealism’s influence is unmistakably redolent in the collection’s later 20th-century holdings. From the existential bodily manipulations of Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, to the post-war abstractionism of Wols, Roberto Matta and Cy Twombly, the space-age forms of Fontana, through to Warhol’s iconic Pop idiom and even the most contemporary works in the collection, Iolas’s collection-building approach was broad-minded and ambitious. With Surrealism as both lodestar and nucleus, and Iolas setting the guiding principles, Pauline undertook an approach collecting and patronage that was encompassing, focused and set to last for next 50 years and beyond.
One of the most significant aspects of the collection’s trajectory, and a huge part of Pauline’s personal journey, was the influence of Andy Warhol. For Iolas, who introduced Pauline and Warhol in the late 1970s, the iconic Pop artist’s career was just as meaningful an accomplishment as his dealings with the Surrealists. Widely acknowledged as the “Man Who Discovered Warhol,” Iolas played an instrumental role throughout Warhol’s career: it was Iolas that gave Warhol his very first exhibition in 1952, and it was Iolas with whom Warhol collaborated to produce his very last body of work: a series based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. The joint brainchild of Iolas and Warhol, these works were designed to fill an exhibition space in the Palazzo Stelline in Milan; a building located directly across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie – the home of Leonardo’s masterpiece. First exhibited at the very end of 1986, the subject and timing of these works would turn out to be poignantly prophetic for both artist and dealer. The Last Supper series made its debut only weeks before Warhol’s unexpected death in early 1987, and within months, this commission would also prove to be Iolas’s swan song: in June 1987 Iolas died at the age of 80. With neat symmetricality, both Warhol and Iolas’s careers began and ended with each other.
Pauline and Dinos would become friends with Warhol and familiar with the Factory and its cast of characters during the last 10 years of the artist’s life. At the behest of Iolas, the couple first visited Warhol’s Factory in 1978 in order to have their polaroids taken for a double portrait commission. This meeting would mark the beginning of a dedication to Warhol that was fuelled by intense admiration and mutual friendship. A great lover of the designs of Belperron and JAR, Pauline would find a fellow enthusiast in Warhol. The two bonded over a shared love of ostentatious jewellery and at one stage Warhol even proposed an artwork/jewellery trade after Pauline showed him some of her pieces during a dinner party at the Karpidas’s London home. It was during this same fateful evening that, encouraged by Pauline and Iolas, Warhol conceived a new group of paintings based on the wonderful suite of six Picasso works on paper acquired by the Karpidas’ from Marina Picasso in 1978.
Executed in 1985 and titled, Picassoesque, Warhol’s rendition of Pauline’s suite of black and white works on paper forms a jubilant reimagining that fits seamlessly into the artist’s contemporaneous canon of “Art after Art”: Warholian versions of great art historical masterpieces. Where the Karpidases had bolstered their collection by acquiring important pieces from Warhol’s 1960s oeuvre at auction – including the record-breaking acquisition of 200 One Dollar Bills (1962) at the Robert and Ethel C. Scull Collection sale at Sotheby’s in 1986 – the couple were fervent advocates and astute supporters of Warhol’s late work. Portrait of Man Ray (1974) and the works after de Chirico and Munch establish a wonderful link to the earlier 20th-century collection-core, while the crucial inclusion of examples from Warhol’s Last Supper (1986) and the prophetic ”Fright Wig” Self-Portraits (1986) delivered a holistic survey of Warhol’s opus that is both personal and unique to the Karpidas Collection. Of the latter, Pauline would come to play an integral role on the occasion of the 1986 Self-Portraits’ debut at Anthony d’Offay’s Dering Street gallery. Following the private view, Pauline hosted an exclusive “Self-Portrait Supper” for Warhol at the Café Royal. As thanks, Pauline received an intimately scaled pink self-portrait inscribed, “To Pauline love Andy Warhol” on the reverse: a wonderful tribute to their friendship and pendent to the colossal white “Fright Wig” that Pauline later bought at auction at Sotheby’s New York in 1997.
Patronage for a New Century
As the 1980s drew to a close, Pauline’s mentorship with Iolas had come to an end. Following an intense programme of reading, visiting museums and galleries, meeting artists, talking to dealers, listening to Iolas’s advice and devoting her life to a pursuit of contemporary art and theory, Pauline had developed an acute eye and artistic sensibility that was entirely her own. Where Pauline’s collecting journey began in 1974 under Iolas’s mentorship, the famously selective dealer now deemed her apprenticeship complete, declaring: “Pauline, you’re on your own.”
With an exciting next chapter ahead, Pauline looked to the very cutting-edge of contemporary art and became a patron in the manner of the great Grande Dames before her, working closely with the likes of Larry Gagosian, Per Skarstedt and Sadie Coles to build an extraordinary collection of 21st-century art. Pauline’s prescient support of some of the most important artists of the last 20 years, alongside the wonderful exhibitions she staged on Hydra during the late 1990s and 2000s, is utter testament to this. Indeed, although the apprenticeship was over, Pauline’s intellectual journey and rich programme of patronage had only just begun.
