Inside the home of Pauline Karpidas, the art-world ‘grand dame' who could be the last of her kind

CNN

10 hours ago

Visual arts
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Behind the elegant but unassuming entryway to an apartment near London's Hyde Park, one of Europe's most prominent collectors has amassed a remarkable trove of Surrealist and postwar art in a home bursting with color and eclectic design.
Now in her 80s, Pauline Karpidas is selling nearly all of the art and custom furniture housed in her dwelling, where major contemporary artists and other cultural figures have socialized among works by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.
As a patron, she's been an influential and connecting force in the art world for decades, yet Karpidas has remained a private figure who rarely speaks to press. But her upcoming sale, expected to fetch some £60 million, ($79.6 million), will be the most expensive collection from a single owner ever offered by Sotheby's in Europe.
'I cannot think of a more comprehensive place, outside of any major museum collection, really, to study and to look and to be encircled with so many core masterpieces from the surrealist movement and beyond,' said Oliver Barker, the chairman of Sotheby's Europe, in a phone call from London.
Out of the sale's 250 artworks and design pieces the top lot is a later Magritte painting 'La Statue volante,' estimated to sell for £9-12 million ($12-$16 million). Other highlights include two Warhol works inspired by the painter Edvard Munch; a Dalí pencil drawing of his wife, Gala; a Hans Bellmer painting made just before the artist was imprisoned in France during World War II; a formative, mystical Dorothea Tanning painting of her dog; and the collector's bed, made of sculptural copper twigs and leaves, by Claude Lalanne. The sale will take place on September 17 and 18, and the works will also go on view in London earlier in the month, providing a rare glimpse at many artworks that have been off the market for decades and will soon be scattered into private hands.
The landmark auction comes just two years after Sotheby's sold off the contents of Karpidas summer home in Hydra, Greece, which became a summer hotspot for artists through her Hydra workshops. In that sale, which more than doubled its high estimate, works by Georg Baselitz, Marlene Dumas and Kiki Smith earned a combined €35.6 million ($37.6 million).
'She's a real diva, in the most positive sense of this word,' said the Swiss artist Urs Fischer in a video call. 'She's also a bit of a mystery to me, despite knowing her for a long time.'
Fischer met Karpidas more than two decades ago when he was in his twenties, participated in one of her Hydra gatherings in the mid-2000s, and has regularly attended art-world parties with her. Fischer noted her 'larger-than-life' presence: She's often in striking hats, cigarette in hand, and has the tendency toward telling grand stories and scrawling, multi-page handwritten letters, he said.
'When I think of any memory of her, she's always at the center of a place — she's not the person on the periphery,' he recalled.
Karpidas, originally from Manchester, was introduced to art collecting through her late husband, Constantine Karpidas, known as 'Dinos,' whose own eye was fixed on 19th-century art including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. Then by meeting the art dealer Alexander Iolas, Karpidas found her own path. Iolas, nearly retired by that point, had been a formidable dealer of major 20th-century artists, particularly Surrealists, and his approach was the 'blueprint' for international mega-galleries such as Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth today, according to Barker. But with Karpidas' financial means and determination, he worked with her to build a singular collection of 20th-century art.
Karpidas is part of the lineage of 'grande dames,' Barker said — the affluent 20th-century women who built social networks across the most prominent artists, fashion houses and designers of the time — and she may be the last of her kind, he noted. She was close friends with Andy Warhol and frequented his parties at The Factory, she was dressed by Yves Saint Laurent, and her homes were the efforts of prominent interior designers Francis Sultana and Jacques Grange. She's been compared to the late, great female patrons Peggy Guggenheim and Dominique de Menil, both of whom she knew. But though her counterparts' collections have become important cultural instructions, accessible to the public at institutions, through Sotheby's, the bulk of Karpidas' collection will be disseminated across the art market.
In her London residence, Fischer said, 'the whole space became one artwork. Every fragment of that apartment has its own little story.' While he's been in many homes of affluent collectors over the years, Karpidas' apartment stands out for how personal and exuberant it is.
'In some way, it's probably a mirror of her interest and her psyche,' he said. 'It's not just like a wealthy person's home. It's like a firework.'
Barker explained that Karpidas' acquisitions have not only been the result of her financial means, but her judicious timing, too. She was well-positioned in 1979 for the record-breaking sale of the collector and artist William Copley's personal collection, netting a 1929 painting by the French Surrealist Yves Tanguy, which will be resold in September. Many works owned by Karpidas have been passed down through famous hands, such as Surrealism founder André Breton, poet Paul Éluard, gallerist Julian Levy, and the family of Pablo Picasso.
'She was not only there at the right time, but she was choosing the right works,' Barker said.
Important patrons have often become subjects themselves, and the same is true of Karpidas. In 2023, Fischer depicted her in an ephemeral piece, with a lifespan of a single gallery show. On the floor of LGDR (now Lévy Gorvy Dayan) in New York, he cast a sculpture of the collector gazing at a reproduction of the 2nd-century 'Three Graces,' an iconic Ancient Greek statue symbolizing beauty and harmony in art and society, which Karpidas purchased in 1989 before selling it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In Fischer's version, he rendered the three female nudes, as well as Karpidas, as life-size wax candles. All white except her dark oversized jewelry, the wax effigy of Karpidas looked to the sculpture she'd purchased decades before, all of the figures' wicks' aflame. Eventually, like many of Fischers' works, they all melted down, the fire winking out.