In the 1960s he started collaboration with the Kultura émigré monthly, and in 1970 began to write essays for it under various pen names to avoid persecution by Poland's Communist regime.

[3] In the 1960s he began to travel to Western Europe, where he was able to meet the Polish émigré ‘outlaw writers’ he admired: Aleksander Wat, Konstanty A. Jeleński, Józef Czapski, Witold Gombrowicz, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Jerzy Stempowski and Czesław Miłosz; he embarked on promoting and interpreting their writings.

Since 1982 he has been an editor of Zeszyty Literackie, a journal launched in Paris during martial law in Poland[citation needed].

Karpiński moved to France in 1982, where in between 1982 and 2008 he worked as a researcher of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

In Poland, despite Communist-era censorship, Karpiński sneaked articles about banned émigré writers, including Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Konstanty A. Jeleński and Witold Gombrowicz, into official publications.

In 1974 Karpiński co-wrote Political figures of the 19th century with Marcin Król, which became one of the most discussed publications in the democratic opposition of the 1970s.

He also wrote about more universally-known writers and artists (Nicola Chiaromonte, Balthus, David Hockney, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).

[citation needed] Two biographies of artists stand out in his work: a painterly and spiritual biography of Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh's pipe (1994), and a presentation of life and art of Józef Czapski, the author's close friend for decades, A portrait of Czapski (1996).

Karpiński continued to write about the history of art and culture in travel essays, American shadows (1982) and Images of London (2014).