The Pauline Karpidas collection is among the most valuable private holdings Sotheby’s has secured in recent years. The London auctions of works from her collection in September 2025 brought in $137 million, setting several auction records and securing the series’s place as the most valuable single-owner auction ever staged in Europe. (Two years prior, a sale of works from Karpidas’s Hydra residence achieved $37.6 million.) A relentless collector, innate aesthete and formidable patron, Karpidas has championed makers who defied convention across generations and geographies. Embracing the surreal, these creatives in art, design and craft wielded irony to expose the absurdities of modern life while celebrating the boundless power of imagination and its capacity, through art, to transcend societal constraints.
This December in New York, Sotheby’s will offer pieces from her extraordinary jewelry collection in a dedicated live evening auction, Pauline Karpidas: The Jewelry Collection. The 70-lot sale, which will be preceded by a public exhibition opening on December 2, includes numerous one-of-a-kind creations commissioned directly from artists and designers such as JAR and Suzanne Belperron. Highlights include exceptional retro jewels by Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels, Jacques Lacloche and Trabert & Hoeffer-Mauboussin, important Art Deco pieces by Cartier and remarkable colored gemstones Karpidas collected on her travels around the world.
“There has always been something magical about wearing a work of art,” Karpidas says in the sale announcement, reflecting the fact that perhaps more than almost any other object, jewelry can carry memories. “A jewel becomes part of your story, accompanying you through moments, both ordinary and extraordinary, and gathering friendships, experiences and meaning along the way.”
Karpidas has always felt a deep connection to objects and the energy they hold, treating them almost as amulets throughout her collecting journey. Consequently, the lots in the sale are less a collection of jewelry than a portrait of Karpidas herself, as Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, observed in the announcement. “Fearless in scale, bold in color and exuberant in spirit, these are jewels that make no attempt to whisper.” Barker first met Karpidas 35 years ago, and the two have since maintained a close friendship rooted in mutual admiration and shared vision.
“Pauline has always had an extraordinarily clear sense of what speaks to her, and that instinct runs through both her art and her jewelry: bold design, unexpected juxtapositions, color, wit, and above all, imagination,” Quig Bruning, Sotheby’s global head of jewelry, told Observer. “You see that especially in the sculptural jewels of JAR and Suzanne Belperron, which share an affinity and a DNA with the avant-garde and Surrealist art she collected. The media may be different, but they belong to the same visual language.”
Among the highlights are several unique creations by Suzanne Belperron, a pioneering figure in French jewelry whose avant-garde approach rejected the rigid geometry of Art Deco in favor of sculptural, organic and tactile forms. An exquisite example of her style is an aquamarine and diamond necklace/brooch estimated at $150,000-250,000. With its formal audacity and striking balance of edginess and elegance, the piece embodies its maker’s unconventional vision of femininity.
Karpidas was also an early supporter of Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR), whose groundbreaking designs share a similarly daring spirit. They move fluidly between the whimsical, the playful and the erotic—again, with much in common with the Surrealist artworks the collector admired. A floral pendant necklace, estimated at $250,000-350,000, has a sinuous articulation and sense of movement that echo the biomorphic compositions of Les Lalanne. Another JAR highlight is a sapphire and diamond necklace set with matched sapphires of significant size, estimated at $200,000-300,000. The sale’s top lot is a more classically styled JAR ring of colored diamond and chalcedony, estimated at $2.5-3.5 million.
Yet Karpidas’s taste is hardly confined to the avant-garde. Her fascination with history shows in an 18th-century sapphire and gem-set reliquary cross, which she often wore to galas and dinner parties and which heads to Sotheby’s with an estimate of $80,000-120,000. The cross once belonged to Francesco Martelli, apostolic nuncio to Poland, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem and cardinal from 1706 until his death in 1717.
Karpidas acquired other jewels in the sale at historic auctions. Two pieces were in Sotheby’s landmark 1988 sale of jewelry and watches from the Andy Warhol estate: a rock crystal bracelet by Seaman Schepps, circa 1945 (estimate $50,000-70,000), and an amethyst and diamond brooch with a pair of ear clips by Verdura (estimate $20,000-30,000). Equally notable are a pair of ruby boule bead earrings and a matching ring by Cartier (estimate $100,000-150,000), acquired at Sotheby’s 1987 sale of the Duchess of Windsor’s jewels.