Sotheby's sold all 55 lots of Pauline Karpidas's Surrealist and design collection on New Bond Street for £73.2 million, led by Magritte's La Statue volante.
Sotheby’s New Bond Street sold every one of the 55 lots in the Pauline Karpidas evening on Wednesday 17 September 2025, for £73.2 million.
Karpidas began collecting about fifty years earlier, encouraged by the gallerist Alexander Iolas. Her flat near Hyde Park held Surrealist paintings by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso beside furniture made for her by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, among others. Sotheby’s had sold her Hydra collection in 2023 for $37.6 million.
Samuel Baker sold his first lot in London in 1744, and the house that grew from that sale has traded from New Bond Street since 1917. Oliver Barker took the rostrum, and all 55 lots were guaranteed against a high estimate of $53 million for the evening. Her Surrealist works came through the collections of Edward James, William N. Copley and Julien Levy and the estates of Man Ray, Magritte and André Breton. A day sale of 193 lots and an online sale of 97 lots followed, and the three sales together made £101 million, the highest total for a single owner’s sale in London.
The evening offered 23 Surrealist works, eleven of them by Magritte. His La Statue volante of 1958, estimated at £9 million to £12 million, led the night, and 70 per cent of the lots sold above their high estimates.