Historic carvings by Ennutsiak fetch high prices

“Family enjoying musical instruments stone and ivory,” 1955, by Ennutsiak (1896 to 1967) (COURTESY OF WADDINGTON’S)

“Leap frog,” 1955 by Ennutsiak (1896-1967.) (COURTESY OF WADDINGTON’S)

More than 250 Inuit art collectors bid in a packed room for four hours on 400 carvings and prints at a Nov. 9 auction in Toronto, racking up sales of $1.3 million and surpassing even the best pre-sale estimates of the Waddington’s auction house.

The top selling piece, a stone tableau of a family playing musical instruments, fetched $54,000.

More than half of the auction’s sales, about $500,000, came from Cape Dorset prints, a “great tribute” to the Kinngait print shop’s 50th anniversary, said Duncan McLean, president of Waddington’s auction house and the head of its Inuit art department.

Many of the works up for auction Nov. 9 came from the personal collection of Ron Gold, who worked for Canada’s northern affairs department from 1955 to 1960 as chief of market research, industrial development and tourist promotion in the Arctic division.

Whenever Gold could, he bought prints and carvings.

Striking items in his collection included six greeting cards made by Cape Dorset artists of the 1950s along a bird theme, showing perky red birds and a sad looking blue owl, which sold for $900, Tudlik’s stark, black and white stone cut print,”Seal thoughts of man” from 1959, which sold for $10,200, and a stone cut print from 1957 of a pair of antelope-like grazing caribou by Pootoogook, which sold for $11,110.

This print was among the first prints from Cape Dorset that were sold to the Hudson Bay Co. and put on sale in Winnipeg in 1957— “but there was little recognition of these prints as an exciting new art form at that time,” Gold writes in the auction catalogue.

The star of Gold’s collection was the carving made in 1965 by Ennutsiak that shows two women playing an accordion and a lap harp as a child looks on.

“My friend and favorite stone carver from my early days living in Iqaluit was an old man Ennutsiak who lived in the Inuit community near the U.S. Air Base. In my view, very few carvers have come close to matching the intricacies and vibrancy of Inuit life as did Ennutsiak,” Gold says.

Many Iqaluit residents are descended from Ennutsiak (Inutsiaq), who died in 1967.

Another carving by Ennutsiak, which shows two children playing leap frog, sold for $28,800.

Gold said he was selling his collection so it would “preserved for the future.”

Of the 395 lots offered in the Nov. 9 auction, 85 per cent found buyers, a much better percentage than the industry norm in other departments even in good times, McLean said.

Works by Ennutsiak, Karoo Ashevak, John Tiktak, Osuitok Ipeelee, Niviaxie, Kenojuak Ashevak, Tudlik, Pootoogook and many other early Inuit artists all performed “very strongly with very high prices,” he said.

As for works by the more recent Inuit artists, Waddington’s Inuit art specialist Christa Ouimet said most buyers still go to galleries or other retail outlets for these purchases. But the fact that there are buyers for Inuit art even during a “cautious environment” is encouraging, she said.

Inuit art continues to be recession proof, agrees McLean, who said that latest auction shows Inuit art is “a good investment which will attracts new buyers.”

“All aspects of the market were strong with quality more than anything being the dominant factor for collectors,” he said in an email.

The Inuit art auction also included a Nov. 8 performance of “Take the Dog Sled,” by the Esprit Orchestra and throatsingers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik as well as a screening of the film, “Tusarnituuq! Nagano in the land of the Inuit.”