The Manchester-born model who became one of art’s most powerful patrons

This week, Sotheby’s is making over its London saleroom to resemble the home for one of the more bizarre, eccentric collections they have ever sold. Estimated at £60m, it is also the most valuable single-owner collection they have ever offered in Europe. The Pauline Karpidas collection is a vast assembly of surrealist paintings and sculpture by the likes of René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Giorgio de Chirico together with maestros of European modernism Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia and Alberto Giacometti.

Also in the mix, the celebrated American contemporary artists, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, and design sensations Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne with their zany mix of art nouveau and surrealism. Because everything has been guaranteed by Sotheby’s to sell – that is, they will in effect buy it, if it doesn’t sell in the bidding – it will surpass the collections of more celebrated figures such as Freddie Mercury (£40m) and David Bowie (£33m).

So who is Pauline Karpidas? An arts philanthropist who has donated generously to Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, Tate and Sir John Soane’s Museum, she owned a mansion and subsidised a studio on the Greek island of Hydra for 20 years, where the well-attended parties were said to resemble an art world Annual General Meeting.

But she didn’t inherit wealth. Born Pauline Parry in Manchester in 1942, her father suffered from epilepsy and could not work, and her mother was a domestic cleaner. By the age of 12, she was working in a local market and then as a secretary until she was 19, when she began modelling. That led her into the world of fashion and to a boutique in Athens where she met her future husband, Constantine “Dinos” Karpidas.

Significantly older than Pauline, Dinos was a principal shareholder in Archirodon, a construction company which rebuilt the port of Benghazi in 1961. This opened up the Arab world to him and he found similar work in Beirut, Jeddah and Sharjah culminating in the $1.5bn Palm Islands Project in Dubai before he died in 2005.

Not long after they met, they married and had a son. She was his third wife, his wealth enabled Pauline to pursue her interest in art on a lavish scale.

In 1974, Dinos introduced her to an old school friend, the charismatic Greek art dealer and former ballet dancer Alexander Iolas, famous for his collection of surrealist art and for discovering Andy Warhol. Enthralled, Pauline asked him for advice on collecting. “I don’t get out of bed for one painting,” Iolas replied. “If Dinos wants you to collect, I’ll need $500,000 in escrow as a sign of your intent.” Pauline returned with the money and the journey began.

For the next 10 years, she studied and bought surrealist art from Iolas; Dinos paid the bills. That arrangement continued until 1987 when Iolas died from Aids. One of his last sales to her was Magritte’s painting La Statue volante, which has the highest estimate in the sale at £9m-£12m.

After Iolas died, Pauline’s gaze shifted towards contemporary art, to the artists she would invite to her mansion on Hydra, buying from galleries in London and New York and enjoying the social whirl and approval of the international art set.

At what point Constantine stopped footing the bills is not known, but come the 1990s they were rarely seen together. Pauline began to focus more on selling. In 2009, she sold Andy Warhol’s painting 200 One Dollar Bills, which she and Constantine had bought in 1986 for $383,000, for a record $43.8m. In 2012, Le Sommeil, a painting by Salvador Dalí, for which they had paid a record $805,500 in 1981, was sold privately for more than $10m. In 2020, a late Picasso gouache, Le Peintre I, which they bought at auction in 1984 for $66,000, sold for $2.9m.

Her first public auction took place in Paris in 2023, signalling the end of her experiment on Hydra, with the contemporary art contents of her mansion selling three times overestimate for €35.6m (£31m).

Now based in America, where her son oversees the Karpidas Foundation in Dallas, Pauline has decided to sell up in London. Apart from the surrealists, there are works by Warhol, whom Iolas introduced her to and who painted her portrait. Warhol’s take on Edvard Munch’s The Scream which she bought in 1996 for £62,000 is estimated at more than £2m.

Then, there are the more than 60 Lalannes artworks which were worth nothing when she began buying them in the 1970s. Here, a small copper cabbage with chicken legs is estimated at £300,000.

To experience the eccentricity of it all, visit Sotheby’s next week which is recreating the ambience of her glamorous, jam-packed London home – one more time.

Frieze Sculpture opens with Andy Holden’s bronze birdcalls

Frieze Art Fair’s annual open air sculpture exhibition opens in Regent’s Park on 17 September, running until November 2. Entitled In the Shadows, it is themed this year by artists who address issues of ecological vulnerability. Amongst the exhibits will be Andy Holden’s Auguries (Lament), 2025, three bronzes which are shaped in relation to sound recordings of the fluctuating volume and pitch of birdsong, casting their digital waveforms in metal. In this case, they represent two birds whose future is under threat, a nightingale and a cuckoo, as well as a crow: a bird of mourning and portent.

Holden learned about birds through his father, Peter, who worked for forty years for The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and used to appear on Blue Peter as the resident ornithologist. One earlier version in the series of Auguries, with five bronzes, was acquired by the City of Wakefield and unveiled at the entrance to the Council HQ on 9 August 2023. Fifteen months later, they had disappeared, whereabouts still unknown – they were valued at £196,966.

Last year, another group from the series was acquired by the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands for £150,000. The Frieze Auguries are smaller but will be placed high on recycled telegraph poles and will be priced at £15,000 each or £40,000 for the group. They are being sold through Seventeen Gallery in London or the Hidde van Seggelen gallery in Hamburg.

Two portraits of Gandhi’s 1931 trip to London

A portrait of Mahatma Gandhi made by the British artist Clare Leighton during his visit to London for a round table conference on Indian Independence in 1931 sold for a record £130,000 at Bonhams in July and was reported as the only known portrait that Gandhi sat for at that time.

But the British Art Fair – which takes place at the Saatchi Gallery later this month – has challenged that narrative, producing an alternative portrait which, they argue, was also made during that visit. It’s a painting entitled Gandhi sitting cross-legged spinning yarn, by Suffragette artist Kathleen Temple-Bird (1879-1962) who had access to Gandhi during his visit.

According to the artist’s grandchildren, Gandhi approved of the work because he signed a preliminary pencil sketch she made. The French government then bought the oil painting which now belongs to the Centre Pompidou and the artist made another version to keep for herself. Temple-Bird’s version has remained in the family collection until this year when it was acquired by Florence Evans Fine Art who will exhibit it at the fair (price on application).

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