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The Karpidas Market Bailout

The octogenarian collector, famous for collecting “in depth,” is emptying out her London home and selling an estimated $80 million worth of art and design. She once helped bail out the art market after the financial crisis. Can she do it again?

Pauline Karpidas
The Pauline Karpidas sale comes at a time when the art market has been struggling to return confidence and momentum behind the idea of paying a lot of money for works. So Karpidas’s taste in art and design—a sweet spot between surrealism and contemporary art—will offer an experiment. Photo: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Marion Maneker
August 5, 2025

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Pauline Karpidas is one of a number of important contemporary art collectors with deep holdings of artists such as Cindy Sherman, David Salle, George Condo, and Eric Fischl. She has such an extensive collection of works by Richard Prince that, two years ago, her family’s Dallas art foundation mounted an exhibition that many described as a small retrospective of the artist’s work. It’s said she could do the same with any of the other aforementioned artists. But at 81, she’s rapidly downsizing, which means a trove of works are coming to market.