I t began, as these things often do, at a dinner party in Paris. One evening in the late 1980s, a gregarious and almost certainly couture-clad Pauline Karpidas approached Swiss-born designer Mattia Bonetti. She had seen his work before—celebrated for lending chic interiors a sense of dreamlike fantasy—and asked their host, a mutual friend, to orchestrate the introduction in hopes of commissioning a piece. The two chatted, and it was agreed that Bonetti, together with his collaborator, French furniture designer Élisabeth Garouste, would create a leopard rug for Karpidas’ London townhouse bedroom.
The English collector and philanthropist, now 82, was thrilled with the result: a jungle cat rendered in wool, nearly life-size, and not splayed like a trophy kill but “very much alive and immersed in nature,” Bonetti recalls. “The design was very green, with leopard colors, of course.” The piece evoked the daring animal-print interiors of the 1930s—Jean-Michel Frank, perhaps, or Syrie Maugham—both of whom had designed for Elsa Schiaparelli. Well established in her collecting career, Karpidas had already discovered an instinctive affinity with tastemakers of the past.
The commission proved consequential, marking not only the beginning of a decades-long collaboration with Bonetti but also, perhaps, the creative kernel of Karpidas’ next London home, a jewel-box apartment in The Lancasters—an elegant, mid-19th-century stuccoed terrace overlooking Hyde Park. Together with a small group of collaborators, they would fashion a series of rich interiors to be filled with an array of creations and characters—artists, dealers and fellow provocateurs—a company befitting one of the 20th century’s last true grand dames.
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s she often reminds people with pride, Karpidas’ life began in markedly different surroundings. Born Pauline Parry in 1943 to a working-class family in Manchester, she enrolled in secretarial school at 15 and became a personal assistant by 18. By 19, she had reinvented herself as a model and decamped to London. In her early twenties, she moved again, this time to Athens, where she opened a fashion boutique—fittingly named My Fair Lady—in the bustling port of Piraeus. Even then, the seeds of a curatorial eye were taking root.
It was in Athens that she met her late husband, Constantinos “Dinos” Karpidas, an engineer and businessman from a wealthy family of Greek industrialists. Captivated by Pauline, and with their son Panos on the way, he left his previous marriage to be with her. Dinos already had a collector’s eye, favoring modernists like Renoir and Picasso, but it was another fateful introduction that transformed their collecting path.
At a cocktail party in 1973, he met the legendary dealer Alexander Iolas—a former ballet dancer turned visionary gallerist who brought European surrealism to the US and mentored a circle of influential collectors, including Dominique de Menil, heiress to the Schlumberger oil drilling equipment fortune and the founder of the eponymous Houston collection.
Iolas championed artists such as Ernst, Magritte and Warhol, and with galleries in Rome, Athens, Milan, New York and beyond, had debuted a globalized business model, akin to Larry Gagosian—a dealer who lay in the Karpidases’ future—before Gagosian himself. Though Iolas was semi-retired by the time he met the Karpidases, Pauline persuaded him to guide a collecting journey she wished to embark upon under two conditions: a significant financial commitment—with funds put in escrow—and even greater emotional and intellectual investment. “I am not an art dealer just to sell paintings,” Iolas once told art historian Maurice Rheims. “My collectors are friends—friends that I make fall in love with what I do, with what I see.”
This was precisely how Karpidas approached collecting—from a place of passion and personal connection. Iolas’ mentorship gave her a deep understanding of provenance and artistic lineage. In the early 1980s, under his tutelage, she began to buy into the surrealist canon at a string of pivotal single-owner auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s: the Hélène Anavi sale, the René Magritte studio sale, and, later, the Andy Warhol estate auction.
“She was there at the right time,” says Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and an advisor to Karpidas in recent years. Many of her artists have since had commercial and artistic reevaluations, but when she was buying them, they had yet to be in vogue with collectors. “That’s certainly true of Picabia and a work like ‘Deux Amies’ of around 1942,” says Barker. “These images—essentially sourced from erotic magazines—are prototypes for Pop Art, and they’ve been hugely influential, particularly on artists like Jeff Koons.”
Further key purchases were made at the 1981 sale of the collection assembled by Edward James, an aristocratic British poet and patron, who had supported the surrealist group and indeed made his own contribution in the form of Las Pozas (The Pools), a sculpture garden of dreamlike structures in Mexico’s Sierra Gorda mountains.
At Monkton House in West Sussex, England, James remade his Edward Lutyens-designed edifice into a surrealist folly with drainpipes shaped like overgrown bamboo and trompe-l’oeil silk-effect banners painted beneath the windows. Inside, according to lore, James had the wet footprints of his dancer wife, Tilly Losch, woven into the carpet. Such details captivated Karpidas, who sees collecting as world-building in its highest form.
A s the 1990s progressed, Karpidas deepened her network. She enlisted interior designers Jacques Grange and Francis Sultana and design gallerist David Gill to work on several homes, including a retreat on Hydra, the Greek island where she would later set up an exhibition space. Bonetti, too, remained a close collaborator when it came to the London home, alongside French designers André Dubreuil and François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne—the latter of whom would influence Karpidas in other realms too, including fashion and jewelry.
Her bon vivant style belied a fierce intellect and the stipulations of her education from Iolas, who died in 1987, have never left her. At The Lancasters, a towering bookshelf designed by Bonetti is filled with tomes on art theory and psychology. “She’s read every one,” says Barker, “and as a result of immersing herself in the surrealist and Jungian philosophy—which has always been one of her great interests and passions—came this interplay with the contemporary. She’s always had a finger on the zeitgeist.”
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aving graduated from Iolas, as the dealer himself proudly acknowledged, Karpidas transitioned to working closely with Gagosian and Per Skarstedt in New York and developed a connection with London gallerist Anthony d’Offay. “Pauline was the Holy Grail of clients at the d’Offay Gallery,” recalls gallerist Sadie Coles, who worked under d’Offay before starting her own outfit in 1997—a move Karpidas immediately championed. “On the opening day, Pauline was one of the first people through the door—and bought something right out of that first show.”
Like Bonetti, Coles was to learn that Karpidas had plans for her. “She wanted my help in a journey into younger artists.” The mission found expression in the Summer Workshops, a program Karpidas hosted at her Hydra compound every year from 1997 to 2021, launched each time with a weekend gathering of art-world insiders and new talent. “Each exhibition was a show of the new works she had an interest in or had acquired for the collection.” The open-minded nature of the program is mirrored in the range of works that will be offered at the collection auction, spanning antiquities to works from the 2010s by the likes of sculptor Rebecca Warren.
Barker puts it succinctly: “She’s never been somebody who’s bought for investment. She’s solely engaged with the artists and the quality of the work, which is why she’s got such extraordinary depth of works by George Condo, Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, Grayson Perry, Cindy Sherman... She’s collected them through thick and thin.”
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auline’s contemporary acquisitions did not, for the most part, settle in London—instead staying in Greece or heading to the Karpidas Family Foundation in Dallas, Texas—but their makers would visit. “When I had an exhibition in London with an artist, particularly one not from London, I would take them for a glass of champagne at Pauline’s apartment,” says Coles. Karpidas would give a complete tour and the reactions were unforgettable. Urs Fischer was speechless before the suite of Picasso prints from the Edward James collection. Laura Owens pressed her nose against a Dalí. “It was a rite of passage,” recalls Coles.
There has never been a hierarchy to Karpidas’ installation style. “That’s what made it so remarkable,” says Barker. “It was about living with the best and mixing it cheek by jowl. To have, in a single room, works by Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Dalí and Carrington—collections like this simply don’t exist anymore.” It looked effortless, but of course it wasn’t. Barker recalls Pauline’s response when he asked her to reflect on the process of assembling her collection. “I feel I’ve just been a curator,” she mused. “It’s been a long journey—it’s been a career and an education.”
This auction, then, is not a conclusion, but a punctuation mark. Karpidas has long supported institutions from Tate Modern and the New Museum in New York, where she helped fund an education center. But her true legacy lies in the artists she has championed—and the unapologetic, irresistible boldness with which she’s done so.
Pauline is someone who recognizes potential and refuses to let it go to waste, in herself or in others. “She’s like an Exocet,” says Coles, “with an incredible instinct that directs her to connect with work that is meaningful to her.” Pausing, Coles reflects: “She’s a ringleader—in a very delicate package.”
