The contemporary artists and gallery owners invited to collector Pauline Karpidas’s summer “workshops” on the Greek island of Hydra were given a brief but simple itinerary. “There is little required from you other than an engagement with art and guests: sunbathe, gossip and swim,” their host would advise.
Pictures showed the lucky recipients of such invitations – who included Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry – doing just that.
For the past 50 years, the Manchester-born Karpidas has been more than a kindly host; as a generous patron of the arts she is described as “unique” and Europe’s equivalent of the late American collector Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim.
Now more than 300 works from her collection – many by the artists she supported – that are stored at the Hydra home she shared with her late husband, the Greek engineer and businessman Constantinos “Dino” Karpidas, are to be sold at auction. They include sculptures by the French artists Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, works by Emin, Lucas and Hirst and photographs by Nan Goldin.
“Pauline has been actively engaged in the pursuit and support of younger galleries, recognising their need for patronage,” said Sadie Coles, whose contemporary art gallery in London represents 50 international artists. “There is no comparison to other collectors: Pauline is unique, she is different, she is the grande dame who kicks her shoes off and joins the dance.”
Karpidas, 80, moved from Manchester to London in her early 20s after studying at secretarial school but then relocated to Greece where she opened a clothing boutique in Athens called My Fair Lady. It was here that she met her future husband, whose interest in art was more classic and included works by Renoir and Picasso.
In an interview with Sotheby’s French magazine, Karpidas told how she first visited Hydra in the early 1960s and immediately fell in love with the craggy island. “I was in Athens for a wedding and thought I’d visit the nearby islands,” she said. “After that, I kept coming back to swim off the rocks.”
Oliver Barker, the chair of Sotheby’s Europe, whichis overseeing the auction, said: “Pauline is an absolutely key figure in the contemporary art world. She comes from a very modest background but has that incredible working class work ethic and is entirely self taught. Her husband gave her the means to start collecting.”
Karpidas persuaded Alexander Iolas, the world-renowned collector and gallerist who was René Magritte’s dealer and was credited with discovering Andy Warhol, to come out of retirement to advise her.
“The story goes that the condition for him advising her was that she put money in escrow to show she was serious about collecting,” Barker said.
“With Iolas’s help, Pauline then went out and assembled one of the great post-war art collections … Pauline had an innate sense of being able to spot incredible works before anyone else. She read up about art and went by gut feeling. It was a very instinctive way of collecting.”
The house in Hydra was sold earlier this year.
Karpidas has been a benefactor of the Tate in London for many years and supported an education centre at the New Museum in New York. Little is known of her outside of the art world and she rarely, if ever, gives interviews. In 2009, she sold Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills painting in New York for more than $43m, the second highest price paid for one of the artist’s works. She and her husband had acquired the work in 1986 for $385,000.
In the brochure for the upcoming auction, she said: “I’ll never forget one of the first pieces of advice that Iolas gave to me: ‘In order for you to understand what emerged in the 20th century you must visit every museum in every town you visit, read the biographies of the artists and meet all the curators, gallerists and dealers’ – words that I will always remember and have endeavoured to stick by.”
David Gill, who owns a gallery in London, said: “Like Maecenas in the past or Edward James or Peggy Guggenheim, Pauline was always very involved with the artists and the designs she commissioned. This has given her collection a very personal and unique identity. Always avant-garde.”
“Pauline Karpidas’s collection speaks of a life lived with beauty,” added Mario Tavella, president of Sotheby’s France where the auction is being held.
Karpidas now lives in the US, where her son Panos is based. The auction takes place on 30-31 October at Sotheby’s in Paris.
