PUDLO PUDLAT (1916-1992) KINNGAIT (CAPE DORSET), Reluctant Wife, 1961 (2002 #2)

The narrative of a man taking home his reluctant bride is one that Pudlo addressed at least twice in the early 1960s (see Man Carrying Reluctant Wife, First Arts Auction, July 2020, lot 92). Although traditional Inuit marriages were generally arranged, often when the potential partners were infants, it was customary in some places for the groom to symbolically “steal” his bride. He might quite literally make a show of “picking up” his bride and carrying her off to his camp; it is perhaps not unlike the Western tradition of “carrying a bride across the threshold.” As in his other version from 1961, here in Reluctant Wife Pudlo depicts the scene with great humour. In hot pursuit of the bride, the groom snatches the tail of her amautiq as she tries to scamper away in feigned unwillingness. Pudlo’s image playfully suggests this has stopped her forward course so abruptly that she is lifted bodily off the ground, her arms and legs flailing.

Literature: Man Carrying Reluctant Wife (1961, #16) has been widely illustrated, including in National Museum of Man, The Inuit Print (Ottawa: 1977), cat. 19; Leslie Boyd Ryan, Cape Dorset Prints: A Retrospective (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2007), p. 205; James Houston, Eskimo Prints (Toronto: Longman, 1971) p. 72; Ernst Roch ed., Arts of the Eskimo: Prints (Montreal/Toronto: Signum/Oxford, 1974) p. 57; and Marie Routledge & Marion Jackson, Pudlo: Thirty Years of Drawing (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1990), fig. 5. The latter, a landmark solo exhibition catalogue and the first for an Inuit artist for the National Gallery, is a wonderful introduction to the art and life of Pudlo Pudlat.

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PUDLO PUDLAT (1916-1992) KINNGAIT (CAPE DORSET)

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