There are plenty of ways to turn another artist into a trophy—buy them, bury them, plagiarise them—but Andy Warhol, at his most interesting, preferred to hang them in the shop window and let the world gawk. His 1974 silkscreen portrait Man Ray, now up at Sotheby’s in the Pauline Karpidas sale, is that rare act of homage in a market that usually smells more of trophy-hunting than of conversation.

The picture is exactly what the label says: Man Ray’s head, half in photographic shadow, half in Warhol’s knowing colour fields, squared up to a metre each way. Six examples exist; this is number six of six. You can trace the provenance like a dotted line through post-war art dealing: Milan’s Galleria Il Fauno, Alexandre Iolas—the smooth-voiced éminence grise who could place a work with an heiress before the paint was dry—then Maria Tognoli, a Turin collector of that brisk Italian breed who mixed modernism with couture. By 1999 it had passed through Sotheby’s before being netted by Karpidas herself for her London home.

Karpidas, a collector with an eye less for consensus than for idiosyncrasy, made her fortune in fashion and spent it with a hunter’s relish. Her London Collection—fifty-five lots of Bellmer, Magritte, de Chirico, Dalí, Koons, and the other usual suspects—reads like a salon of twentieth-century surrealism and its pop-descendants. She bought with her instincts, not a focus-group’s: the market has since caught up, as the nine-figure estimates make clear.

Karpidas bought with instinct, not hedge-fund spreadsheets, and her sale now is a parade of market-certified names. The Warhol/Man Ray is pegged at £400,000 to £600,000—small change beside the Magrittes at eight figures, but culturally it’s one of the more intelligent dialogues in the room.

Warhol had already mined the art-historical canon in his Munch series, his de Chirico reinterpretations, and that sly dalliance with the Mona Lisa. But with Man Ray he wasn’t looting so much as staging. Warhol knew Man Ray was a fellow image-maker who blurred the line between art and the gloss of commerce—fashion photography, portraits of the rich, but also the cold precision of the readymade. Warhol’s reverence went beyond the commission. He owned more than two dozen Man Ray photographs—sold in his estate sale—and kept the painter’s Peinture Féminine (1954) in his sitting room. He admired Man Ray’s pre-war portraits of Picasso, Dora Maar, Kiki de Montparnasse—the Paris equivalents of Warhol’s Marilyns and Jackies. Both men understood the power of the image as social currency. But Warhol also indulged in the kind of dry inversion that kept critics guessing: “I only loved him because of his name—Man Ray.” Like “Marilyn” or “Brillo,” the syllables were branding gold, short, sharp, mysterious.