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Artworks
NATSIVAAR (1919-1962) KINNGAIT (CAPE DORSET)
Angels in the Moon, 1960 #41Printmaker: IYOLA KINGWATSIAK (1933-2000) KINNGAIT (CAPE DORSET)
stonecut, 26 x 20 in (66 x 50.8 cm)
21/50LOT 52
ESTIMATE: $2,500 — $3,500$ 2,000.00Natsivaar passed away only two years after the release of the inaugural Kinngait Print Collection. As a result of her untimely death, only two of her graphic works were released,...Natsivaar passed away only two years after the release of the inaugural Kinngait Print Collection. As a result of her untimely death, only two of her graphic works were released, the present Angels in the Moon and Mother and Son (1961 #59).
In her essay on the artist in Grasp Tight the Old Ways, Jean Blodgett writes,
Here two strange creatures float near a fairy-tale moon. The Christian subject matter, the non-Inuit facial shapes and beards of the angels and the way the moon is depicted all point to Western sources. Certainly by the time this work was done the south Baffin Inuit had been converted to Christianity or at least been well exposed to Western religious concepts and literature as well as secular sources. These new ideas were often as well integrated into existing aspects of Inuit culture as Natsivaar's angels and moon are into Cape Dorset graphics. The angel, after all, is just a Western variant of the transformed creature and, while we have a man in the moon, in Inuit legends the moon was originally the brother of the woman who became the sun. There is nothing jarring or alien about Natsivaar's angels or moon in this haunting image from the Arctic. (op.cit)
Provenance
Private Collection, Hamilton.Literature
Image reproduced in Cape Dorset: A Decade of Eskimo Prints and Recent Sculpture, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1967), detail, unpaginated; and in Jean Blodgett, Grasp Tight the Old Ways: Selections from the Klamer Family Collection of Inuit Art, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1983), cat. 69, p. 113.
For additional information of Christianity and Inuit Art, see Jean Blodgett, "Christianity and Inuit Art", The Beaver, Fall 1984, pp. 15-26.
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