Pauline Karpidas

Pauline Karpidas Parry (born 1943) is an English contemporary art collector, private art space benefactor, socialite, and patron of the arts. She lives in the United States.

Early life and career Pauline Karpidas was born Pauline Parry in Manchester in 1943. Parry was raised in a working-class family, growing up in a two-up two-down house. Her father suffered from epilepsy and was unable to work, so her mother acted as the breadwinner, working as a cleaner. In her early twenties, Parry relocated to Athens, where she opened a clothing boutique called My Fair Lady in the port of Piraeus. she first visited Hydra in the early 1960s. Over the years, she worked with Sadie Coles on hosting work by many artists at the Hydra Workshop, including Wilhelm Sasnal (2004), Nate Lowman (2010), Sergej Jensen (2010),

In 2009, Karpidas auctioned the Andy Warhol painting 200 One Dollar Bills, which she had bought with her late husband Constantine Karpidas. Characterizing the 1962 painting, art dealer Tony Shafrazi said, "We’ve seen nothing like this recently [come to auction], this is a masterpiece." The Karpidases paid $385,000 for the painting at a 1986 Sotheby's sale. After a dramatic "bidding war", the painting realized $43.8 million. Karpidas made more than 100 times what had been paid in 1986.

In September 2025, Karpidas auctioned the contents of her London residence The Lancasters, a stucco-fronted terrace overlooking Hyde Park. the highest price Sotheby's had ever placed on a single-owner sale in Europe. Highlights of the auction included works by Leonora Carrington, Andy Warhol and René Magritte. More than half of the lots in the evening sale on 17 September had never before been offered at auction, and three-quarters hadn't been seen for 25 years.

Philanthropy Karpidas is a benefactor of the Tate and the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, and an education centre at New York's New Museum is named after her and her late husband—The Pauline and Constantine Karpidas Education Center.

In 2012, Karpidas donated a vast sum of money to the University of Manchester, particularly to the Manchester Access Programme, including the Karpidas Excellence Scholarship. The donation also included 90 contemporary works of art for the museum's art museum, The Whitworth.