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 sold all 55 lots of Pauline Karpidas: The London Collection at Sotheby’s on New Bond Street in Mayfair on Wednesday 17 September 2025. The evening made £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 them stood furniture made for her by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne.
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. Sotheby’s had sold her Hydra collection in 2023 for $37.6 million.
Oliver Barker took the rostrum, and every lot was guaranteed, against a high estimate for the evening of $53 million. The sale offered 23 Surrealist works, eleven of them by Magritte. His La Statue volante of 1958 led the night.
Seventy per cent of the lots sold above their high estimates. A day sale of 193 lots and an online sale of 97 followed. The three sales together made £101 million, the highest total for a single owner’s sale in London.